井底之蛙

As many of our readers already know, the Taiwanese government has re-named the Chiang Kai-shek memorial in Taibei, now known as the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. This is actually sort of interesting, as lots of states have to deal with the “problem” of old historical monuments. This is a particularly big problem for the CKS memorial, as it is HUGE and right in the middle of town. I used to walk across it every day to change buses and stopped in to see the movie about his life about 50 times. The movie was unimpressive, but the AC in the place would lower your core temperature to the point you could walk a mile in the Taibei summer without breaking a sweat. Although there have been some protests about the renaming, the bigger problem is the symbolism. The tiles are all blue, as a symbol of the Nationalist Chinese flag. Will they be painted green? Also, the dimensions of the building are symbolic.

The square shape of the building represents the spirit of the mean and of rectitude (chung-cheng which is also Chiang Kai-shek’s name); the three-tiered staircase symbolizes the Three Principles of the People; the two-tiered eight-cornered roof eaves, built in the shape of the character jen (man) and coming together at the pao-ting converge with the sky, symbolizing revered Mr. Chang’s belief that “Heaven and Man are One”¹)

Of course one could come up with Taiwanese justifications for these dimensions, which is probably what was done in the first place. It seems, however, that this will be yet another chapter in the fight over the past. Chiang actually did quite well for himself. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, Chiang’s actually called attention to his Christianity, which was not allowed in the case of Sun. Mao had to suffer the indignity of having other revolutionaries honored in what was orginally his space. Chiang’s statue is still all by itself, and its hard to see what they can do with it.

Of course Chiang has had to suffer the ultimate indignity. The museum of his life has been replaced by an exibit on the Taiwanese democracy movement, whose chief enemy was of course Chiang. If they keep changing memorials like this Taibei will become St. Petersburg.

1. Frederic Wakeman “Funerary Rites: The Remains of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung” Representations 10 (Spring 1985 [↩]

Salon.com is having an interesting little discussion of Tonio Andrade’s new book How Taiwan Became Chinese. I have not yet read the book, but I am familiar with Andrade’s earlier, excellent, work on the Dutch period in Taiwanese history. As one might expect, despite the fact that the book ends before 1700 and Andrade denies that his work should be read in light of current debates about the status of Taiwan, that is exactly what is happening. One of the main contentions of his book seems to be the not very controversial position that the Chinese settlement of Taiwan began under Dutch rule and that the early history of Chinese settlement should be understood in the context of the globalizing world of trade in East Asia. He also says that “Taiwan today is culturally Chinese.” This has needless to say led to some criticism, given that any statement you can make about the nature of Taiwan will lead to someone taking offense.

As regular readers know, I am interested in the question of how people are defined as Chinese. One nice bit of data comes from Hans Kuhner. He is looking at a pair of families in the early Ming and trying to figure out what, for them, is Chinese behavior. Although today the Yuan-Ming transition is sometimes presented as an uprising of native Chinese against their Mongol rulers and a restoration of Han rule, in fact the ethnic transition was a lot more complex, as shown in the case of two families.

One of the families is the Ding lineage of Quanzhou, once a major port for international trade. The Dings won their first jinshi degree in 1501. In their genealogies the first ancestor is Jiezhai, and all the early ancestors have Chinese names and are presented as wholly Chinese. It is only much later that it comes out that the first ancestor was also called Sayyid Ajall, a Bokharan who served as a governor under the Yuan. Sayyid stayed on in China after the fall of the Yuan, changing his name and attempting to deflect the considerable hostility towards semu people in the early Ming. This hostility was entirely popular. The state did not order purges of non-Chinese and in fact went to some length to avoid ethnic trouble. The Dings, however, got in a good deal of trouble over the years, as political opponents accused them of false registration, largely, it seems as a way of getting even with the Dings, not because people were so concerned with ethnicity. A later descendent, Ding Yanxia, described the family’s background this way.

We cannot know in detail where our family (jia) has come from before the time of Jiezhai. As far as religion (jiao) is concerned, in former times they seem to have followed customs that were not yet civilized. For example, they did not change the clothes [of the dead person] before it was put into the coffin, and they did not use wood for the coffin. The burial took place already on the third day after death, and [the corpse] was only covered with a very thin layer. The mourning attire was made of cotton, and when praying, there were no soul tab­lets for the ancestors, and no sacrificial offerings. On meetings, people bowed to the west at the time of sunset. Every first month [of the year] there was a period of fasting and one was allowed to eat only after sunset, while during the day, people were hungry. God (shen) was revered only with aromatic herbs, there were no sacrifices of wine and fruit and no paper money [as sacrifice] was burned. When reciting the holy book (qing jing) one imitated the traditional sound of the barbarian (yi) language, without understanding its meaning and not even trying to understand it. This was done on both happy and unhappy occasions. It was only allowed to eat meat that was slaughtered at home, and pork was forbidden. One regularly had to take a bath, and without bathing one was nor allowed to attend worship. As for clothing, cotton was preferred to silk, and on all occasions, cleanliness was desirable. When I was young, I still could see these customs personally. … Today, we burn paper money in the sacrifices for the ancestors, cattle has not to be slaughtered at home, all wear hemp as mourning attire, no more cotton. Sometimes, people wait as long as ten years before the burial. On both happy and unhappy occasions, Daoist and Buddhist monks are invited. Pork is eaten, and there is increasing conformity with [Chinese] ritual. However, there still are some who are proud of not fol­lowing the [Chinese] ritual. With regard to the desirability of cleanliness, I have seen no reduction. Alas, as far as the teachings of the Noble Man on ritual are concerned, some maintain that it should be based on the traditions of one’s coun­try and should be adhered to without the slightest change, Others maintain that some [aspects of] ritual can be different while others should be adhered to, with their practicality as criterion. What does “practicality” mean? It should conform to the principle of heaven and to human emotions. If they do not harm these two, why should we change them just in order to conform to the views of society?

(more…)

A nice little picture from Shenbao, one of Shanghai’s most important early 20^th century newspapers. The caption complains about Chinese women. Specifically it points out that Chinese women have taken up the habit of smoking on the street, and that when Westerners see them doing it they point out that in the West women don’t even smoke at home, much less in the street. Yet another example of how different commodities fit differently in different societies. Smoking is a particularly tricky one (not the most relevant link, but the best film of struggling with use of cigarettes I could find.) The cigarette is the best way to walk around while smoking, and to make smoking a part of all your everyday activities, rather than a separate social space, like gathering around an opium pipe or a complex tobacco pipe. For a western woman to smoke in the street at this point would have been a defiance of gender roles. For a Chinese woman it marks you as modern. The caption-writer seems to be trying to create a less brazen definition of modern Chinese femininity. It seems to have worked, too, since Chinese women today are a lot less likely to smoke in public than men.

Of course the picture is also cool because it seems to be an early Elvis sighting.

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

A Chinese Peasant

There are lots of Western holidays that don’t translate well to China. Christmas shows up a bit, especially since all the ornaments are made in Asia, but Easter, Halloween, Canada Day etc. don’t mean much. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day do translate however, and Mother’s Day has at least some popularity in Taiwan and Hong Kong and I think in China too. Father’s day is a harder sell, because the relationship between Chinese fathers and children is supposed to be fairly distant. Confucius’s relationship with his son Po-yu is the locus classicus

Analects 16.13

Ch’an K’ang asked Po-yu, saying, “Have you heard any lessons from your father different from what we have all heard?”

Po-yu replied, “No. He was standing alone once, when I passed below the hall with hasty steps, and said to me, ‘Have you learned the Odes?’ On my replying ‘Not yet,’ he added, If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to converse with.’ I retired and studied the Odes.
“Another day, he was in the same way standing alone, when I passed by below the hall with hasty steps, and said to me, ‘Have you learned the rules of Propriety?’ On my replying ‘Not yet,’ he added, ‘If you do not learn the rules of Propriety, your character cannot be established.’ I then retired, and learned the rules of Propriety. “I have heard only these two things from him.”
Ch’ang K’ang retired, and, quite delighted, said, “I asked one thing, and I have got three things. I have heard about the Odes. I have heard about the rules of Propriety. I have also heard that the superior man maintains a distant reserve towards his son.” translation here

That a father should have a distant relationship with his son became a standard belief.
Mencius 4a18 expands on this a bit

Kung-sun Ch’âu said, ‘Why is it that the superior man does not himself teach his son?’
Mencius replied, ‘The circumstances of the case forbid its being done. The teacher must inculcate what is correct. When he inculcates what is correct, and his lessons are not practiced, he follows them up with being angry. When he follows them up with being angry, then, contrary to what should be, he is offended with his son. At the same time, the pupil says, ‘My master inculcates on me what is correct, and he himself does not proceed in a correct path.” The result of this is, that father and son are offended with each other. When father and son come to be offended with each other, the case is evil. ‘The ancients exchanged sons, and one taught the son of another. ‘Between father and son, there should be no reproving admonitions to what is good. Such reproofs lead to alienation, and than alienation there is nothing more inauspicious.’translation here

In other words, the teacher/student relationship and the father/son relationship are sufficiently different that they can’t be reconciled. A student can hate being criticized by a teacher (in fact they probably should), a student can see and even point out the hypocricies of a teacher’s behavior. None of these are appropriate with a father. There is supposed to be affection between fathers and sons, but fathers are never supposed to display it.

In the Family Instructions of the Yen clan the dangers are spelled out (all these from the Teng translation pp. 4-5)

Relations between parents and children should be dignified without familiarity; in the love between blood-relations there should be no rudeness. If there is rudeness, affection and fidelity cannot unite; if there is familiarity, carelessness and disrespect will grow. After sons receive official appointment, they and their father should occupy different apartments.

If this is not the case bad things will happen. A father may fail to discipline his son.

In the time of Liang Yuan-ti (r.552-54) there was a gifted and talented youth; his father loved him so much that his training was neglected. A single well-chosen word the father would praise for a whole year wherever he went; each evil act he would conceal and gloss over, hoping for self-reform. When old enough to marry and serve the state he became daily more rude and arrogant. It is said that Chou T’i disemboweled him for his ill-considered speech and consecrated a drum with his blood.

Also, there are things that a father should not discuss with his son.

Someone asked “Why was Ch’en K’ang fond of hearing that men of virtue kept their sons at a distance?” “That was” I replied. “due to the fact that men of virtue did not personally teach their sons.” The satirical couplets in the Book of Songs, the warnings against jealousy and suspicion in the Book of Decorum, the cases of rebellion and disorder in the Book of History, the ironic comments on depraved deeds in the Spring and Autumn Annals, the symbols of procreation in the Book of Changes, all these should not be mentioned between fathers and sons, and so were not personally taught.

Although the nature of the Chinese family changed a lot between the time of Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591 CE) and the present, but even in modern China a father is supposed to be pretty distant and disciplinarian. Mao had a famously rocky relationship with his father, in part I think because he was not willing to accept his father’s constant upbraiding. As Michael Sheng points out most of the stories of oppression that Mao told were fairly standard Chinese father stuff.

Not really related to anything, but I found it interesting. Chinese students in New Zealand have been protesting this image of Chairman Mao from a student newspaper

I suspect that the protests have as much to do with recent anti-Chinese incidents mentioned in the story, as well as other things published recently in the paper as with the image. I was a bit surprised to see Mao being the thing that touched so many students off. Not real surprised, of course, since Mao’s reputation in China has always been quite different than that in the West. One student said that. “Chairman Mao is like Jesus to us” Mao of course is not the first Chinese revolutionary leader to be compared to Jesus. Sun Yat-sen compared himself to Jesus on his deathbed. For lots of non-Chinese Mao is the Chinese Jesus, i.e. an iconic figure who stands for “China” even for those who know nothing else about the place. Apparently at least in this context some Chinese students agree.

Via Volokh

Some years ago while studying in Beijing I bought a good number of nicely bound hardback volumes from a series entitled the “Library of Chinese Classics” (大中华文库, published by the 外文出版社 and 湖南人民出版社 in 1999), which includes many of the standard Chinese philosophical works one might expect to find in such a collection. What I found so delightful about the collection was the very useful way it put the original classical Chinese together with a modern Chinese translation of the classics on the left side of each page, along with an English translation on the right side of the page. In addition to letting me see how certain classical Chinese phrases are rendered into modern Chinese, it made it easier for me to find the original literary Chinese when I’m looking for a particular passage I have seen in other translations.

After a failed attempt in China, I’m taking first year “literary Chinese” again this year and after a semester of mostly reading some famous accounts of great assassins, we have moved on to Mengzi (classical Chinese is one of those wonderful languages where first year students dive straight into reading great literature). I often refer to other translations as a check on my own pitiful attempts and learn a lot from the ways various scholars have approached difficult passages. Unfortunately, from the perspective of English readability, the English translation in the above mentioned series is usually the worst I have come across. Many sentences feel like direct literal translations and are often horribly bland. While I’m in no position to evaluate the accuracy of this relatively new work, even if it were to trump all previous translations by correcting various egregious errors or misunderstandings, I wouldn’t want to use it by itself. Look, though, what one of the English editors, Chu Zhida, has to say in the introduction to the Mengzi volume in this series after he has listed other existing translations of the work:

“From the above-mentioned translations and theses we can see, Mencius bears certain influences in the west. But in modern cultural, the flow-in and flow-out are not balanced. Those flowing out were most completed by foreign missionaries, and later introduced and translated by foreign sinologists. Those completed by Chinese scholars especially systematic introduction are next to none. Since the study of the Chinese traditional culture has been orientated by the westerners, it sounds that the secondary supersedes the primary. As a foreigner, even if he is a sinologist, his knowledge of Chinese ancient history and cultural background is surely limited. As a result of the great differences between the east and the west, those translations and reviews must have born some negative influences. The author once wrote an article entitled Comments on James Legge’s Translation of Two Passages from Mencius (published in Chinese Translators Journal, the 6th issue of 1995), in which he pointed out: The work of translating The Four Books and Five Classics had better be completed by Chinese scholars in certain institutions and in a planned way and a number of learned scholars should join the work led by an authoritative administration, thus making those Chinese national treasures have better versions of foreign languages and become an important component of the world cultural treasure-house….As a translator it is an honour for the author to join part of the work. Working as a reviser of the English version of Mencius gave him an excellent opportunity to learn. Mencius mainly translated by Professor Zhao Zhentao is of high quality and better than the earlier versions such as J. Legge’s. It is worth admiring.” (41, my bold)

Fortunately, the English in the translation of the main text is at least better than Chu’s own introduction. What can we say of the claim made here though? On the surface it seems fairly harmless, if not common sensical to suggest that “foreigners” are at a distinct disadvantage when attempting to tackle such great Chinese classics, and it is certainly not controversial to claim that their knowledge is “limited.”

However, Chu is making the stronger claim that the translation of such works should be left to Chinese scholars. The result of this in this particular case, as I have indicated, was a translation that judged on its English alone, left much to be desired. The solution, of course, would have been better cooperation between the Chinese scholars and translators on this project, and truly fluent and eloquent English speakers (of any origin) who could have pointed out the many places where the resulting English prose suffered.

While the discussion here is specifically about translation, this issue is closely related to one that many of us “foreigners” who study East Asia must face time and time again. Must all of us humbly concede at the start of our careers that due to our “limited knowledge” and “cultural background” everything we do must be tainted with whatever Chu means to imply with the term “negative influences”? Must we confess that we can never truly do important and inspiring work in the field of, say for example, Chinese history and constrain ourselves to the subordinate task of introducing this room of the world’s “cultural treasure-house” to the ignorant West? Indeed, doesn’t the title of this website, 井底之蛙, suggest that we have already submitted to the verdict?

I think many of us would contest all of the above, and dismiss many such attacks as arrogant nativism. However, as this passage suggests, it is still more common than we might like to think. A friend of mine who studied early Japanese poetry for her dissertation was told by the professor she was to work with during her time in Japan that, “Foreigners can’t possibly understand the Manyôshû.” She had to switch to another professor, at another university, who had more faith her capacities.

It will always be the case that well-trained “native” scholars will be able to read more, faster, and will in many cases have “better instincts” on interpreting various material. I for one am constantly reminded of my own linguistic limitations, not to mention my vast areas of ignorance when I was doing some of my research in Tokyo and Taiwan, especially when compared to others I met there sharing my interests. However, I have also encountered plenty of counterexamples to the latter “better instincts” claim, especially with scholars who may have spent greater time studying and working with certain kinds of material than their “native” counterparts. Whatever raw skills we attribute to certain individuals, however, and however easily we dismiss the idea of an innately superior interpretive ability of a people for their “own” history, it doesn’t change the fact that all of us studying the history of East Asia suffer from severe limits to our vision (and I don’t mean to suggest by this metaphor that there is one “complete picture” out there to be seen), whether we are working/raised in the United States or in Taiwan, China, etc. That, I believe, is what I had in mind when starting out on this 井底之蛙 project. I would love to see more interaction between graduate students and professors in the less formal and hierarchical setting of a weblog like this, between academically minded students/professors and the greater public interested in East Asian history, and between those of us studying East Asia “over here” and studying East Asia “over there.”

–As a final provocative afternote, I should mention that I feel strongly that the fact that Orals/Comprehensive Exam PhD reading lists are in many cases largely or sometimes completely limited to English language works is one of the first steps within the graduate education setting here to creating the mental divisions between “our academic” world and “their” academic world.

A not-too well informed article from the L.A. Times lamenting the decline of lively, slang-filled Cantonese in favor of the polite and dignified Mandarin. Obviously written by someone who has never been to Beijing. Or Tianjin. Or a lot of other places. No doubt a lot of Cantonese speakers do regard the school-ish Mandarin they know as dull, but the analysis is not very strong in the article. The article blames the Mainland government for pushing Mandarin, although the focus is on Chinese in America, where the pushing is obviously of a different sort. Part of what is happening of course is that the new waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. are as likely to be Mandarin speakers as not. 20 years ago my Mandarin was almost useless in American Chinatowns (Actually, 20 years ago my Mandarin was almost useless anywhere.) Now I almost never hear Cantonese. The interesting thing to me is the difference between today and the survival of Cantonese (and Fujianese, etc.) in the past.

Mandarin obviously works better if you have a community of lots of Chinese from different places, which is more likely now with cheaper transport and closer contacts with China. (One of the people learning Mandarin in the article was doing so to be able to speak to his grandkids in China.) The strange thing is that for a very long time Cantonese worked just fine to hold together business networks and families and such. Now if you insist on staying in the Cantonese ghetto you are sacrificing a lot, and people are leaving.

Why the change? Part of it I suppose is velocity. People moving around a lot more and communicating cheaper and quicker make it harder for a minority dialect to maintain its kingdom. Part of it is probably a political change. Hong Kong is no longer the gateway to China in the same way it was, nor are the Cantonese particularly likely to be the interpreters of the West to China. China is all open now, and Canton no longer has a special position.

I suspect part of it is that family and provincial ties are also less important than they were in 1906. The idea of continuing your Chinese studies in school is no longer just fillial piety for Asian Americans, and of course that means Mandarin. Is there anything else driving this? I know the Singapore government has been pushing Mandarin for a long time. What’s happening in Australia? Even better, what is happening in Indonesia, where acting like a trans-national Chinese might not be a good idea.