井底之蛙

In a review of Thomas C. Reed, and Danny B. Stillman‘s new book, The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation, William Broad writes that

Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.

This doesn’t jibe with what I remember about the relationship at all. Perhaps I’m overreacting to the word “freely,” but there was considerable resistance on the Soviet side to full cooperation with the development of Chinese atomic bomb and missile technology.¹ In most accounts that I’ve read, that foot-dragging was a significant element in the ultimate break between the two powers, and the Chinese had to work from the bits and pieces the Soviets gave them² combined with knowledge gleaned by Chinese who studied in the US and France.

This doesn’t seriously call into question the basic thesis of the book, which is that nuclear weapons technology spreads by diffusion — usually with some element of theft, subversion or treason³ — and that China has been a major proliferator in the post-Mao era.⁴ Reed and Stillman assert that

China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea. Alarmingly, the authors say one of China’s bombs was created as an “export design” that nearly “anybody could build.” The blueprint for the simple plan has traveled from Pakistan to Libya and, the authors say, Iran.

That puts China square in the middle of one of the most important and troubling trends of the last quarter-century.

1. See, for example, Sergei Goncharenko, “Sino-Soviet Military Cooperation,”, Brothers in Arms: the Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1963, ed. Odd Arne Westad, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 141-164. [↩]
2. See, for example, Ji Qiang, “The scientists making the atomic bombs” [PDF], pp. 130-132, which describes Soviet help in the 1950s but that aid quietly disappears from the narrative around ’59. [↩]
3. This isn’t a new idea; I’ve been telling my students for years that the United States is the only nation to have actually invented the atomic bomb. But their level of detail and access to new sources sounds pretty substantial. [↩]
4. The French are the other major nexus, having aided the Chinese and provided the Israelis with most of their technology, and Israel has gone on to share it with others, most notably South Africa. [↩]

I recently came across a book called Some of Us[i], recommended to me by one of the contributing authors, Dr. Jiang Jin. The book is a collection of memoirs and stories put together by 9 women who lived through China’s Cultural Revolution and subsequently got their Ph.D.s and now are teaching (or in Jiang Jin’s case, was teaching) in the states. What brought them together was a discussion among 3 of them about such Memoirs as Wild Swans and Red Azalea, and the subsequent discovery that these memoirs do not accurately represent their feelings and experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, what these memoirs had done was create a specific image of Maoist era people in the West, almost an Orientalizing process, if you will. Everyone was either a victim or a victimizer, and everyone’s families had either been killed, torn apart, or driven to insanity during the Cultural Revolution.

I personally have always loved the book Wild Swans. My high school history teacher made us read it, and it had originally sparked my interest in Chinese history. But is there a problem with teaching books like this in the classroom? Chen Xiaomei points out the problems with teaching Wild Swans, in that she was “unwittingly contributing to a discourse of China bashing occurring in America and the rest of the West.”[ii] Chen then tried to show different points of view by talking about her own childhood, and she claims in her narrative that she was “honestly happy.” I had always taken these kinds of memoirs for granted, and I admit, I am still shocked when Chinese people talk to me about their experiences as zhiqing and how they were truly positive experiences that helped to shape their own personas, unlike the way it is painted in Wild Swans. It also made me think of other historical events and how we imagine everyone to have lived the lives of the few whose lives we read about. Do we think of the Japanese army in such a holistic way in World War II because of the Rape of Nanjing? We probably make similar assessments about American history; even though I know it is not true, I can’t help but think of all Americans in the Great Depression as the Joad family from the Grapes of Wrath. Historians claim to know that their are too many narratives to possibly record, and there are millions of interpretations of one similar event; but how do we effectively, especially in a class, show the plethora of interpretations of one 10 year period?

Another issue that is broached in this book which I find important in the study of history is the concept of being “brainwashed,” and the negative connotations that carried. My favorite line in this book is from Wang Zheng’s memoir. She talked about an encounter with an American woman who told her with “apparent pride that her daughter was a cheerleader.” After discovering what a cheerleader was, Wang claimed “I just hoped that my eyes would not betray my disdain as I thought to myself, ‘I guess this American woman has never dreamed of her daughter being a leader cheered by men.’ I felt fortunate that I was ‘brainwashed’ to want to be a revolutionary instead of a cheerleader.”[iii] I couldn’t help but laugh at this because, as a woman growing up in the United States, I went through this phase of wanting to be a cheerleader which most, if not all, girls go through; and not once did it dawn on me to be a leader being cheered by men. I think that when we use the term “brainwash” we don’t think about our own experiences, and we certainly don’t think that perhaps we have been “brainwashed” as well. We, in America, I think often tend to think of the Maoist era as the “dark ages,” (which this book points out), but many of these memoirs very directly show how gender equality was actually far more advanced in Maoist China than in China (or America) today. In our discussions in a class I audit, Professor Jiang pointed out to us that Chinese women have actually taken a huge step backwards since the 1970s. Similarly, these 9 women show in their memoirs, most obviously in Wang Zheng’s memoir, that gender consciousness was something they didn’t experience until their 20s or 30s, where in America our teenage culture constantly drums it into our heads while still maintaining that women have the same opportunities as men.

As a student just exiting her undergraduate education, I think that more books like these should be taught if only to show the plurality of historical interpretation for a specific event. I came across this book auditing a class called “Women in Chinese history” at East China Normal, and many of the students in the class admitted that before reading this book, they all assumed the Wild Swans narrative worked for all people during the cultural revolution. Furthermore, part of history (I feel) is self exploration, and I think this book challenges a lot of assumptions we make about the contrast between China and the West concerning education, “brain washing,” and women’s rights (I believe most Americans still think that China is 20 years behind us). Since I’m not a professor yet, I can’t decide what to teach, but I found this book an effective means of getting across points that most historians want students to grasp, forcing them to challenge assumptions about historical events, personal experiences, and their own experiences.

From the Times via CDT an article about a group of Chinese intellectuals who are asking for some new people to be put on Chinese currency. This is actually a big issue, since who nations put on their money is a political statement of some importance.¹ The list of suggested people is pretty interesting. They are suggesting Qu Yuan, Li Bai, Yue Fei, and Wen Tianxiang. The Times calls Qu Yuan a poet, which he was, but of course he was much better known as a protester against political corruption. Li Bai is the “pure” poet in the group, and Yue Fei and Wen Tianxiang are both straight nationalist figures who died resisting foreign interference in China’s internal affairs. It is a well-thought out list (Not all Mao, but nationalistic enough to pass muster) and I wish them luck, but I suspect not much will change. Chinese money has always been very focused on politicians.

Sun Yat-sen got most of the face time under the Republic, appearing on all sorts of notes.

Mao has taken pride of place since.

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1. I’ve always thought that American money had remained stuck in the 19th century because of a lack of national confidence. If someone did suggest changing our money some Democrat would probably suggest putting MLK on there and Republicans would go nuts about political correctness. Easier to stick with Jackson. Plus, if we went with more modern designs and colors like most of the world has done in might turn us gay. [↩]

The New York Times has published three reviews of new Chinese works in translation: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (pen name for Lu Jiamin) and Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. What binds these works together, in particular, is that all three are — at least in part — about the experience of the Cultural Revolution.

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Danwei has some links on the current war over free speech in China. The whole thing was sparked by an April 3 editorial in Southern Metropolis Daily. The author, Chang Ping, was critical of some of the Chinese responses to western media coverage of Tibet. I have not read every single post at Anti-CNN, but the main issue that was making people angry was that some media outlets were publishing pictures of Tibetans being arrested in Nepal and claiming that they were pictures of what was happening in Tibet.

<>According to information compiled by netizens, certain media in countries such as Germany, United States, United Kingdom and India made clear factual errors in their reporting. From the viewpoint of journalistic professionalism, these errors were very wrong, even deliberately misleading. Although some media outlets have issued apologies and corrections, the damage from the inaccurate news was already done and the Chinese people find it hard to forgive. Like any kind of fake news, the damage is first and foremost on the public trust in the media themselves, because ten thousand truths cannot undo one lie. If in the reporting of the incident (as well as other major incidents), the Chinese media are not allowed to report freely and the overseas media are suspect, then where is the truth going to come from?

I was not too surprised by this mix-up, nor by the fact that the Western media did not make a big deal about the correction. Hey, it’s some Asian cops, who really cares if they are Chinese or not. More to the point, CNN would probably claim that the basic story (unrest in Tibet violently suppressed by Chinese security) was correct, so no harm no foul. Even the liberal Chang Ping however would not buy that. He goes from an “error” to “deliberately misleading” in just one sentence. Then it becomes “fake news” which “the Chinese people find hard to forgive.” Not quite Milton on free speech. Still, Chang Ping was to some extent criticizing Chinese nationalist criticism of the West, and this set off a firestorm, triggered in part by an editorial in Beijing Evening News

I took a look at the so-called speech of this Southern Metropolis Chang Ping. I noticed immediately that this individual had brought “free speech” to an appalling or even “terrifying” degree. The heart of the matter for which he was criticized was this: “Free speech intrinsically includes the freedom of mistaken speech and particularly the freedom to question authority. More frightening than rumors is the removal of free speech.” And he openly held this up as a universal value. According to his logic, “free speech” means that you can muddy the truth, fabricate facts, indiscriminately distort history, speak irresponsibly, “freely” rumor-monger, “freely” smear, “freely” toss about labels. Just like the western media’s hysterical performance on the issue of China’s Tıbet. Was that free speech? That was violent speech. I have never seen the western media enjoy that kind of freedom of speech in their own country, because that would be an infringement on the rights of others, and it would trample social justice and betray fundamental ethical principles.¹ If this is the “universal value” that Southern Metropolis Chang Ping wants to protect, then honor is the price he pays in return.

There are lots of more temperate voices out there, but the one I found most interesting was 十年砍柴 who compares the whole thing to the Evening Chats at Yanshan incident during the Cultural Revolution. A number of his comments pick up on this theme 大家快跑,文革又来了! I actually think this is a pretty good point. One problem with the Deng years was that that it was not certain what the sacred cows of the New China were. It is not news that nationalism quickly became one of them, and that the Olympics and Tibet are currently flashpoints for Chinese nationalism. What I find interesting is how the old CR political culture is coming back. Orthodoxy as the key political value.² Battles in the newspapers over words that can be read as anti-Mao/anti-China. Key essays that will end up in a future Modern China class. The state is not actively doing much about these cases, but what I would call New Red Guards are taking (or at least talking about) direct action. Apparently the Maoist political culture is proving to be more resilient than one would have hoped.

1. Are Chinese media people really this ignorant of the western press or is he just lying? [↩]
2. You get some of this everywhere, of course. Not that I’m bitter [↩]

I am somewhat fond of public history despite knowing nothing about it. So, one of the things I am assigning to my Modern China students is Dahpon David Ho‘s “To Protect and Preserve: Resisting the Destroy the Four Olds Campaign, 1966-1967″¹ Ho looks at the Cultural revolution history of the Confucius Temple Qufu, Shandong. I’m not sure if anyone knows if Confucius actually lived there, but it has been the home of his descendants the Kongs and a central part of the Confucian cult throughout the imperial period. Thus it would be a place that the Red Guards would very much have wanted to destroy. They were not able to do so because the place was ably defended by locals, and why and how they did it is the topic of Ho’s essay.

One thing that Ho makes pretty clear is that lots of people thought destroying cultural relics was wrong from the get-go. Zhou Enlai gets a lot of credit here but there were plenty of others, and most of them used revolutionary rhetoric to defend these relics, confiscating things and then claiming that destroying them would be destroying state property, closing museums and temples to the public or, as in the case of three memorial steles for Jesuit missionaries, having the Red Guards help bury them. One could also praise the workmanship of ancient peasant craftsmen, or point out that the Japanese had also tried to destroy these relics. Calling something “old” is just one way of attaching history to an object, and of course there are others.

In the case of Qufu, Ho shows that local pride was a major factor. Qufu county secretary Li Xiu had begun organizing supporters even before the Red Guards arrived. He claimed later that he felt he was “defending our country’s cultural relics.” Local youth had smashed a lot of “four olds” but they had ignored the Confucian sites, which were “built with the blood and sweat of countless generations of laboring masses.” Chairman Mao had toured the site in 1952, and while he had not said anything nice about it (as he had at other sights)  he had not called for its destruction either. It was not until August of 1966 when the sites were attacked by students from Qufu Normal Institute (mostly not local people). They were driven back by locals, but they soon began to find allies among students in Beijing. Eventually a fair amount of damage was done, but the buildings themselves were preserved as a reminder of the “Kong family landlords.”

What I found most interesting about the article is how spot-on it shows the Anti-Four Olds campaign to have been. A lot of Western accounts treat it as a silly/stupid thing that may have caused a lot of destruction but had little “real” importance.  Actually, there seem to have been few signs of “feudal” society that meant more to those destroying them and those protecting them than relics. Ken Ling, one of the Red Guards was moved by the willingness of (mostly old) people to risk their lives to defend these relics. “The stubbornness of these people angered me, but it also moved me.” And, one presumes, made him think.

1. in Esherick et al eds. The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History Stanford 2006. [↩]

The lively and informed blog, Jottings from the Granite Studio, January 8 has a well turned piece “This date in history: The Death of Zhou Enlai.” The piece shows that Zhou was a consummate statesman who perhaps snookered Nixon and Kissinger, with a reputation for countering Mao’s excesses and acting the suave statesman.

I remember the reporter Harrison Salisbury telling a story about the cosmopolitan Zhou. At the Geneva Conference of 1954 Zhou went around a reception greeting each delegate in his own language, showing up the less worldly Khrushchev, who knew only Russian. Khrushchev, according to another story, later struck back by observing to Zhou how strange it was that he, Khrushchev, came from a peasant background while Zhou was quite the aristocrat. Zhou is said to have thought for a moment and then replied, “true, but we each betrayed the class from which we came.”

For a long time, the story was that John Foster Dulles was so anti-communist that at this Geneva Conference he refused to shake Zhou’s hand. Problem is that when a spoil sport researcher went to check, there was no time at which the two were together. Still, when Nixon went to Beijing in 1972, he clearly had heard this story. He bounded down from Airforce One and the  first thing he did was to shake Zhou’s hand!

Another example of Zhou’s reputation is in a piece of urban folklore about Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. At that time the small but famous Gansu Flying Horse was on display in one of the capital’s museums. Nixon, thinking we was alone, admired the horse so much that he stealthily put it in his pocket. A museum guard, according to the tale, secretly observed the deed, but hesitated to report the theft for fear of destroying the friendly atmosphere of the visit. What could he do but take the incident to Zhou? That night at the banquet, after the mao tai, Zhou introduced China’s leading magician. The magician performed several feats, then unveiled a reproduction of the Flying Horse which he then caused to disappear. Where was it? Well, he announced, reaching into Nixon’s pocket: “Voila!” So once again, the wily and humane Zhou saved the day.

But the Jottings piece also asks: “What sort of machinations and compromises were necessary to linger in power while those around him were being swept away?” What about allowing his long time comrade Liu Shaoqi to die of untreated pneumonia lying on the floor of an unheated jail cell?

Much of this enigma is spelled out in the recent book by Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (NY: Public Affairs, 2007; translated by Peter Rand and Lawrence R. Sullivan). Gao was a researcher at China’s secret party archives where he had access to files, interviews, gossip, memos, and internal compilations. He smuggled out notes and documents with which he wrote an explosive Chinese language biography of Zhou, published in Hong Kong in 1999, which the translators have slightly supplemented for English language readers. This is not the cynical view presented in, say, Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician (New York: Random House, 1994), much less the unhinged portrait in Chang Jung and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005). Li chronicled Mao’s refusal to take baths or brush his teeth, his sexual use of young women, and his rapacity towards both enemies and old comrades. He doesn’t allow that Mao ever did anything which was not despicable, which may be a reasonable stance but not convincing if other arguments are not even considered. Likewise, Chang & Halliday’s argument is terribly weakened because it strays too far from evidence.

Gao, on the other hand, allows Zhou’s accomplishments, which are usefully sketched in the Jottings from the Granite Studio piece. Yet in spite of Zhou’s reputation as a balance to Mao’s extremism, Gao paints an ultimately damning portrait of a man who said yes to power. What would have happened if Zhou had stood up to Mao or at least advised him differently? Would he have lasted?

Would it make a difference if we accepted, as Zhou surely did, the legitimacy of the Revolution? After all, every nation or political cause accepts some form of the proposition that the ends justify the means. Was it legitimate to drop the Atomic Bomb? Stalin justified his slaughter of innocents by saying “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” But, asked somebody (presumably in a very quiet voice) “how many eggs do you have to break to make one omelette?” Or, we might add, when so many eggs are broken, shouldn’t we demand to see an omelette?

Philip J. Cunningham at Informed Comment Global Affairs has a great post about Chinese State TV and their Dialogue commentary program. I’m just going to excerpt the funny and historical bit below the fold, but the rest of the discussion, hopeful and realistic, is quite worthwhile. The focus is actually on the collaboration/mutual exploitation relationship between CCTV and Japan’s NHK.
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James Fallows recommends the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center. At least as a web museum it is not as good as Stefan Landsberger’s I did find the introduction (English only, apparently) interesting

ach poster exhibited here is a piece of art with history when all the people in China sacrificed for the greatness of one person. Mao Zedong ruled over China from 1949 to 1976. He turned around a quarter of the globe population in continuous political movements, especially in Culture Revolution, to fight with each other physically or mentally. The traditional Chinese philosophy and morality was abused. The sky and earth turned upside down. Nightmare came to its end at last as Mao died in 1976 and the civilization of China survived. The propaganda posters presented here tell you all these stories.

Today China is on the right track for prosperity again. Shame will it be to forget the recent past. Our purpose and responsibility is to help people understand the process of the rebirth. Long live the great Chinese people and its civilization. From art viewpoint, many of these pieces are great art works created by none commercial emotion. Time is changed and such kind of art could not be repeated. They are so limited and very hard to be found now. The value will be tremendous in the future.

We are very proud to have the best collection of this kind in the world and we are serious to prepare for a special museum in Shanghai for the education of the younger generation as well as being the destination of the foreign visitors.

The one thing that jumped out at me was the point that these were “created by none commercial emotion” but their “value will be tremendous in the future” In China as it lots of other places the relation between Art and Money has long been a complex topic. If for some reason you wanted to say something nice about the Mao period you could point out, as here, that it was less commercialized and money-grubbing than, say, the China of today.

One thing about China is that they are always re-building historical sites. Here are some guys building a new…something…. at the old Ming palace in Nanjing.

The thing they are making is made out of concrete, and just a generic “traditional” decoration, nothing particularly to do with the site. Much more common in the U.S. is the idea of public history that produces things like this

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