井底之蛙

As we are at mid-semester I thought it would be a nice time to think about Education, with a little help from Feng Zikai, Republican China’s best-known cartoonist.

Feng obviously did not think much of education in general

Education is the process of changing raw materials into something else

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As a follow-up to Konrad’s post below I came across something on dogs in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, where he is lamenting the passing of the old city, but at least the dogs are holding out as modernization sweeps things away. I’m not sure wartime dog-killing quite fits with this, but some of the other aspects of Communist and Nationalist animal control certainly do.

What grievance I feel when I read western travelers on Istanbul is above all that of hindsight: Many of the local features these observers, some of them brilliant writers, noted and exaggerated were to vanish from the city soon after having been remarked. It was a brutal symbiosis: Western observers love to identify the things that make Istanbul exotic, nonwestern, whereas the westernizers among us register all the same things as obstacles to be erased from me face of the city as fast as possible.

Here’s a short list:

The Janissaries, those elite troops of great interest to western travelers until the nineteenth century, were the first to be dissolved. The slave market, another focus of western curiosity, vanished soon after they began writing about it. The Rufai dervishes with their waving skewers and the Mevlevi dervish lodges closed with the founding of the Republic. The Ottoman clothing that so many western artists painted was abolished soon after Andre Gide complained about it. The harem, another favorite, also gone. Seventy-five years after Flaubert told his beloved friend that he was going to the market to have his name written, in calligraphy, all of Turkey moved from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet, and this exotic joy ended too. Of all these losses, I think the hardest for Istanbullus has been the removal of graves and cemeteries from the gardens and squares of our everyday lives to terrifying high-walled lots, bereft of cypress or view. The hamals and their burdens, noted by so many travelers of the republican period—like the old American cars that Brodsky noted—were no sooner described by foreigners than they vanished.

Only one of the city’s idiosyncrasies has refused to melt away under the western gaze: the packs of dogs that still roam the streets. After he abolished the janissaries for not complying with western military discipline, Mahmut II turned his attention to the city’s dogs. In this ambition, however, he failed. After the Constitutional Monarchy, there was another “reform” drive, this one aided by the Gypsies, but the dogs they removed one by one to Sivriada managed to find their way triumphantly back home. The French, who thought the dog packs exotic, found the cramming of all the dogs into Sivriada even more so; Sartre would joke about this years later
in his novel The Age of Reason.

Max Fruchtermann, the postcard artist, seems to have recognized the exoticism of the dogs’ survival: In a series of Istanbul views he produced around the turn of the twentieth century, he was careful to include as many street dogs as he did dervishes, cemeteries, and mosques. p.242

Lots of bits of Chinese prose would make great blog entries. (A blog is basically a biji, more or less) Plus, they make great things to teach from. So, if any of you are teaching about the Song dynasty elite and their attitudes towards the mundane world you might find this from our guest-blogger Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 to be helpful or informative.  (tips on working with it here)

A Record of the Pavilion of an Intoxicated Old Man

Ou-yang Hsiu

All around Ch’u there are mountains, but the forests and valleys of that assemblage of peaks to the southwest are the finest. There is one that appears from afar most luxuriant and deepest in verdure—that is Lang-ya. After you have walked six or seven tricents into the mountains, there you will gradually notice the sound of water gurgling. Where it drains out between the two peaks, this is Brewer’s Spring. Rounding the peak the road winds; there a pavilion hangs, like a wing, out over the spring. This is the Intoxicated Old Man’s pavilion. Who was it that built this pavilion? A monk of these moun­tains, Chih-hsien. And who named it? The prefect, who called it after himself. When prefect and guests come to drink here, because he becomes intoxicated after only drinking a little and because he is the oldest in years, that is why he nicknamed himself the Intoxicated Old Man. But what he means by Intoxi­cated Old Man has nothing to do with the wine; it has to do instead with being in the mountains by the water. This joy from the mountains and the water he feels within his mind; he merely ascribes it to the wine.

Now the sun rises and the forest mists dissipate, the clouds return and the caves in ravines grow gloomy—these alternations of dusk and light mark mornings and evenings amid the mountains. Wild flowers bloom with their hidden scents, beautiful trees leaf out with deepening shade, then winds rise and pure frost appears, the water level drops and the rocks protrude—such are the four seasons amid the mountains. In the morning he goes there, in the evening he returns; the scenery of the four seasons is never the same, hence his joy knows no bounds.

Those who carry loads on their backs sing along the path; sojourners rest beneath the trees. The ones in front call out and those behind respond. Some are bent over with age and others so young that they must be led by the hand. They come and go without cease—such are the travelers around Ch’u. One may lean over this stream and fish; the stream being deep, the fish are fat. Or one may brew wine with the spring water; the spring being fragrant, the wine is crystal clear. Sliced meats from the mountains and wild vegetables arrayed in profusion before the guests—such are the prefect’s banquets. The joys of the feast are not from strings or winds; they are from winning at pitch-pot, from victory in chess. Passing goblets and mugs back and forth, shouting with abandon, now sitting,, now on their feet—such is the happy abandon of the guests. And the one who, ruddy-faced and white of hair, lies sprawled in their midst—that is the prefect intoxicated.

When the merriment is over and the evening sun sets among the mountains, the prefect goes home with his guests in tow, their shadows jumbled together. The forest gloom deepens; birds call high and low. The revelers all gone, the birds are joyful. Yet, though birds may know the joy of mountain forests, they know not the joy of mankind; men may know the joy of revels with the prefect and yet never know the prefect’s enjoyment of their joy.

Intoxicated yet able to share their joy, able when sober to describe it in writing—such is the prefect. And what is this prefect’s name? Ou-yang Hsiu of Lu-ling.               Translated by Robert E. Hegel

醉翁亭记

环滁皆山也。其西南诸峰，林壑尤美。望之蔚然而深秀者，琅琊也。山行六七里， 渐闻水声潺潺，而泄出于两峰之间者，酿泉也。峰回路转，有亭翼然临于泉上者， 醉翁亭也。作亭者谁？山之僧智仙也。名之者谁？太守自谓也。太守与客来饮于 此，饮少辄醉，而年又最高，故自号曰“醉翁”也。醉翁之意不在酒，在乎山水之间 也。山水之乐，得之心而寓之酒也。若夫日出而林霏开，云归而岩穴暝，晦明变化 者，山间之朝暮也。野芳发而幽香，佳木秀而繁阴，风霜高洁，水落而石出者，山 间之四时也。朝而往，暮而归，四时之景不同，而乐亦无穷也。至于负者歌于塗， 行者休于树，前者呼，后者应，伛偻提携，往来而不绝者，滁人游也。临溪而渔， 溪深而鱼肥；酿泉为酒，泉香而酒冽；山肴野蔌，杂然而前陈者，太守宴也。宴酣 之乐，非丝非竹，射者中，弈者胜，觥筹交错，坐起而喧哗者，众宾欢也。苍然白 发，颓乎其中者，太守醉也。已而夕阳在山，人影散乱，太守归而宾客从也。树林 阴翳，鸣声上下，游人去而禽鸟乐也。然而禽鸟知山林之乐，而不知人之乐；人知 从太守游而乐，而不知太守之乐其乐也。醉能同其乐，醒能述其文者，太守也。太 守谓谁？庐陵欧阳修也

For more discussion see

• The Old Drunkard Who Finds Joy in His Own Joy -Elitist Ideas in Ouyang Xiu’s Informal Writings
• Xianda Lian
• Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 23, (Dec., 2001), pp. 1-29

“Beware of China, for when the dragon wakes she will shake the world.”

Napoleon? Although there’s no evidence that he ever said it, the quote caught the essence of what westerners thought should be the case and has been endlessly recycled.

But over the last decade a lot of  loose talk about “China Rising” has been going around, getting more intense in the last couple of years.

History News Network has a collection of recent posts gathered from the internet, “HNN Hot Topics: China Rising.”

China Beat, our second most favorite blog (after this one) has run a powerful set of pieces on “Big China” books, that is, books that loudly hail or bemoan China’s rise or menace. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, has roundup, “Six Takes on Martin Jacques,” a follow up to his piece in Time Magazine online blog (Feb 8, 2010), “Big China Books: Enough of the Big Picture.” Jeff skewers the Olympic scale conclusion jumping in a gaggle of these books, especially Martin Jacques, When  China Rules the World : The End of the Western World and the Birth of a  New Global Order.

The China Beat piece also points out another recent well informed and provocative piece, Richard Rigby’s “The Challenge of China” at East Asia Forum.

A nice photo essay from Financial Times on railways in Inner Mongolia.  Lots of nice pics, but the thing that amazed me was that the author was traveling with a  “coachload of well-dressed Chinese steam enthusiasts.” Needless to say they were there to ride one of China’s last working steam locomotives.  For those of you who don’t know, train nuts are at least as fanatic as comic book collectors or stamp people or whatever. As far as I am aware China does not yet have a Myles na gCopaleen,  but apparently they do have plenty of people who are nostalgic for the vanishing industrial past.

This week, our East Asia History Reading Group had the fortune of discussing Richard White’s The Middle Ground with Professor White himself. The purpose of this book was to write the history of Native Americans and Empire in the pays d’en haut, the area around the Great Lakes, from the years 1650-1815, a region Professor White has termed the Middle Ground. Professor White presents the Middle Ground both as a spatial and theoretical construct. It is both the area where Europeans and Indians coexisted and created a new cultural space, and also a theoretical term meant to point to the process with which Indians and Whites mutually accommodated each other, constructed together a mutually comprehensible world. He traces through 2 centuries the creation and destruction of this process, and the ways in which alliances, wars, trade and empire affected the ability of Indians and Whites to maintain a status quo. He also complicates the traditional narrative of empire. A narrative of the conquerer and the conquered obscures the complexities of the relationships between and among Indians and Whites, and while violence was present, the middle ground appeared and “depended on the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force.” The Middle Ground, he points out, is not a pretty place. He has often been called an apologist for colonialism because he pointed out the compromises and concessions each side had to make. This, however, is obviously not the case; the Middle Ground was created out of destruction and violence, the description of which in the book was nauseating.

The reason we decided to read the book is because the concept of the Middle Ground can be used in other contexts; it has been cited numerous times in books about border regions in China, specifically Yunnan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Qinghai (Peter Perdue cites White in his bibliography, and a new great study by C. Patterson Giersch uses White’s work as theoretical construct). Reading this exhaustive account of American history, I also became confused as to the extent to which his theory could be applied. Were all colonies Middle Grounds? Does it work outside borderland situations? Does it even work outside of the pays d’en haut?

To clear up some of these questions, I will summarize some of White’s interesting insights. Despite the fact that he did not want to be the “judge in the court of the Middle Ground,” he did think that both the physical space and the process did have some distinguishing characteristics. First of all, it needs to be a situation in which the two opposing groups could not overwhelm one another by force. At the same time, it needed to be a situation in which both sides needed the other. Finally, there needed to be a set of institutions in place to sustain this balance of power. In the pays d’en haut, this included Jesuit priests, a system of posts, a gift giving system in place, etc. Professor White pointed out that it is these institutions which distinguished other parts of the Americas from the pays d’en haut; they were not a Middle Ground, simply areas of cross cultural contact.

Professor White stressed that the one way in which the Middle Ground did not work in later colonial situations is that if one side has the overwhelming power to dictate, there was not a Middle Ground. He stated that in the pays d’en haut before 1815, the French and British did not break local power and rule, in fact, the didn’t rule much of anything. This description rules out a lot of European empires. The Middle Ground is also not, as Professor White claimed, a place where everyone came together and loved each other. Nor is it another term for cultural compromise. Misunderstandings actually played a large role in the creation of the Middle Ground. What he meant by this was that each group tried to argue with one another based upon their understanding of the other sides’ cultural premises. As an example from his book, he shows how Indians tried to make arguments with the French based upon their understanding of Christianity, and at the same time, the French attempted to spread Christianity by using terms they extracted from local religious practice.

The Middle Ground is also historically contingent; it, like all things, has a starting point and an end point. There are many reasons the Middle Ground of the pays d’en haut came to an end, one of the most important of which was that the Americans of the frontier no longer needed Indians. He also brought stressed a point that he made near the end of his work: ethnography and anthropology helped to erase the Middle Ground. These studies, which for the first time introduced race, created a group of “others” that could not be dealt with in an equal level (this is not to say the French did not see the Indians as “others”; but the otherness came from the fact that they were not Christian, it had nothing to do with race). The example he gave to us was the issue of marriage. In the pays d’en haut, temporary marriages were quite common. Once the marriage came to an end, the father mattered little; the woman would simply take her child, half French and half Indian, back to her village. The issue of race, or difference, was not important. In fact, towards the end of the 18th century, identity was a matter of personal choice; no one could be said to be completely French or Indian. This changed in the 19th century, when these Indian women were told by their villagers to leave their husbands and their mixed children behind because they were not pure “Indian.” This was done in the name of tradition, when really it was a quite radical statement. In this way, as  White claimed, when Middle Grounds disappear, they become black holes, sucking everything into themselves, including historical memory.

At this point we should ask, how applicable are these theories to China? Some of us in our group pointed out that these theories are very helpful in describing situations in borderlands, where neither the central Chinese government nor other bordering empires had any control over the local population (Giersch, who wrote of frontier politics in Yunnan, certainly thought so). The situation in China, however, was much more complicated. The 司土 system in areas such as Qinghai and Tibet created a system of local warlords which administered these regions. In some of these regions, the local imperial appointed warlords had much more power than others, so the use of Middle Ground is contingent on a case-by-case basis. There were some areas in which local leaders ruled in succession for generations, and others where power was determined by the ability to mediate and communicate, thus creating a Middle Ground.

Another issue that distinguishes the system in China from other contenders for the Middle Ground is the fact that there was no real clear starting or ending point like there was in the pays d’en haut. These groups on the frontiers of China had been interacting for centuries, and there was no clear starting point that would help us trace the creation of this Middle Ground (if there was, perhaps the Song or even the Han dynasty). Nevertheless, framing the trade and relations in these areas within a Middle Ground framework it seems would be useful for analysis.

For those interested, White will be releasing a 20 year anniversary of his book soon. He plans to write a new introduction that summarizes the way his work has been used (and sometimes misused) as a theoretical framework.

Recently, I’ve been leaning my research towards Hong Kong (a subject I tend to write about a lot…). I found that a lot of scholars of China and scholars of colonialism tend to not know a lot about work on Hong Kong. So I did my own investigation. I put together a pretty exhaustive essay on Hong Kong’s historiography. I won’t post it here, but I will mention some of my favorite books. The following is a short list, and it’s limited: these works focus mainly on the earlier colonial period (pre 49) and on social history.

By far, I found the best book to be John Carroll’s Edge of Empires (2005). He recounts the growth of Hong Kong nationalism and local culture through middle class Chinese businessmen. While businessmen may sound slightly uninteresting, his discussions of the 1913 and 1920s protests are good, as is his discussion of Sir Ho Kai (another good essay by Carroll in the recent collection of essays The Human Tradition in Modern China, ed. by Kenneth James Hammond, Kristin Eileen Stapleton, 2008). A parallel work which focuses on the labor class as opposed to the business class (yet covers a similar time frame and similar events)  is Jung-Fang Tsai’s Hong Kong in Chinese History (1993). While he does a good job in reconstructing the lived experience of laborers, I find his categories of identity troubling; it seems that he wrote this when everyone was looking for “nationalism” in everything, and I’m not convinced of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong the way he describes it. Perhaps more promising would be his more recent 香港人之香港史, though I have yet to read it.

Another good but exhausting read was Christopher Munn’s Anglo China (2006). It’s a few hundred pages of legal history, but it is quite successful in disproving the wide held belief that Britain was a “hands off” colonizer. Includes a lot of interesting legal cases. And as far as disproving myths, Patrick Hase’s book The Six-Day War of 1899 (2008) shows that British colonialism in Hong Kong was not non-violent, as often assumed.

Of course, there are important older works, such as Elizabeth Sinn’s Power and Charity (1989), Ming K. Chan’s work on the labor movement (mostly in essays) and Henry J Lethbridge, Hong Kong, Stability and Change. I don’t know a lot about post 49 works, but a couple which caught my eye were Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation and Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance.

If anyone wants to add to this list, please do; I’m always looking for books, especially about women in Hong Kong (I found Women in Chinese Patriarchy, which has a few chapters on Hong Kong; also an honorable mention).

It occurred to me that some of our readers may also have occasion to teach about Chinese conceptions of the afterlife, and specifically Chinese Hell. I got some pictures of Hell while I was in Xian, specifically at the Daxingshan Temple. Like a lot of sites it Xian it has a very old history, but much of what is there now is quite recent. Also like many mainland temples it is pretty eclectic in its Buddhism, with Tibetan-style prayer wheels..

and a pond full of animals that have benevolently not been eaten

Lots of mainland temples seem to assume that you received very little religious instruction and thus you will need to learn about it here. Thus they have a nice Hell room, that illustrates the punishments that you can expect if you misbehave. My apologies for the picture quality, as it was kind of dark, my camera and skills were poor, and I was reluctant to disturb the occasional worshiper.

Like Dante’s version, the Chinese Hell has specific punishments for specific sins.

Kidnappers are sawed in half.

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I don’t know how many Chinese cities have these, but in Xian the buses mostly have Emergency Bricks

They are set on those two pins, so they don’t move around, but you can easily lift them up. Why are they there? Well, if the bus flipped over you might need to break a window to get out. You would need like a brick or something to do it with. Well, here is the brick. There is even a sign pointing to it sometimes, in case you can’t find it.

This struck me as a very Chinese-y low-tech safety measure, but one that would probably work.¹  Sadly I did not take one of these bricks home with me. It would have been theft of state property, which is bad, and it would have killed my weight limit. Now of course I regret it. My office really needs an Emergency Brick for those occasions,  usually involving administrators, when one feels that all one’s problems could be solved with the application of a brick to the right spot.

1. Some buses had little hammers for the same purpose. I think a brick would work better. Also people might steal a little hammer [↩]

I have tried to stay off the subject of how the internet will change the world, since there is enough of that on the internet already. I was struck by this piece, (Via Sullivan)  which gushes about the wonderfulness of self-publishing, specifically the idea that Joshua Marshall is hiring a publisher.

The sheer joy of the idea that the creators should have the whip hand and “publishers” just be errand boys who handle making the copies  (think of a university without administrators) is likely to cloud the mind, but there is more to this than just happy visions of publishers tending the gardens of the Forbidden City. What would the world look like without publishers? Without music company executives?

Happily, China had a thriving printing culture for a good thousand years before the introduction of western-style printing machinery in the late 19th century created a modern publishing industry, so we know something about this.  The Chinese reluctance to adopt movable type  is even now sometimes presented as a puzzling example of the anti-technological bias of those silly people, but actually there was no great need for it. Woodblock printing had already begun revolutionizing Chinese culture by at least the Song dynasty, and movable type did not add much. One of the big advantages of woodblock printing was that it cheaper and required less capital. To print a book with movable type need a set of type with many copies of each letter (expensive in the West, more so in China) and literate typesetters. Since the type is broken up up after printing a page you need to have the capital to buy enough paper (usually a major expense) and to wait for the things to sell or to swallow the loss if they don’t. With Chinese block printing you needed a literate author to write the book, but then you could paste the paper on a woodblock and have an illiterate (and cheap) carver cut it out. Storing all the woodblocks could be a pain, but since you did not break them up you could print as many copies as you needed (print on demand!) and then keep the blocks. At least some literati would leave their woodblocks in their wills. (I know Yuan Mei did, and I would guess others did too.) There was far less need for the work publishers do and the capital they provide.

China certainly had publishers going back at least to the Ming. Cynthia Brokaw has written about the small-scale publishing houses that churned out and distributed cheap books for the masses. The commanding heights of Chinese publishing, however, were occupied by the literati-publishers who were better known as writers, editors, and collators than as publishers.  If a person had a reputation that would sell books they did not need a lot of capital to go into business for themselves. China did not have much by the way of copyright law back then, but they were somewhat protected by the fact that they had already made up the printing blocks for their famous works. This would not help the small publishers making cheap copies of the Four Books, of course, so they lived in a cutthroat low-margin market while the more elite writers floated above that.

This seems to be sort of what technology is creating today. Publishers still exist, and if you want to publish “Chicken Soup for a Goldfish’s Soul” you will need a publisher to advertise it and make sure that stacks of it are piled up at the local gas station. If you are famous enough and not really wanting to go after Stephen King’s sales records self-publishing is getting easier and easier. We may end up with a two-tier system like China had.

Oddly, the one place where new publishing trends are not really taking hold is academia. You would think that given all the authors who sell dozens of books on their own reputations rather than marketing hype, and the fact that getting it out there rather than getting rich is the goal, scholars would go in for self or electronic publishing. Journals certainly have, but academic books of course serve a purpose other than being read, which is proving that you are a scholar by coming out in hardback with the name of a publisher on the spine so that you can keep your job. The cultural importance of publishers is still there, and it will be interesting to see how long they can resist the technological trends that are moving away from them.

There is a lot of scholarship on this, although I would not blame any of the people below for the errors above.