井底之蛙

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 book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 (Harvard University Press) by Xu Guoqi ¹ , is a good read but also a serious piece of research which uses sport to see new dimensions of nationalism. The Olympics, one of those “invented traditions” if there ever was one, and nationalism feed on each other. Xu has the story on everything from Chiang Kai-shek to Ping Pong Diplomacy to the politicization of the non-political ideal and all points in between.

Susan Brownell’s Beijing Olympic FAQ at China Beat has a slightly contrarian take on the recent flap over Olympic torch protests. She suggests that the comparison with the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany is not so useful as a comparison with the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis — remember the song, “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louey?” The United States was then the rising power, fresh from conquests in the Philippines and ready to take on the world. Brownell points out why Europeans could look down their noses at the newcomers and how Americans responded.

Meanwhile, two other recent posts also put the present moment into (drum roll, please) Historical Perspective.

“China’s Nationalism and How Not to Deal With It” at China Digital Times translates a Chinese blog posting which also urges more patience, while the response from “angry young Chinese” to the torch protests is nicely illustrated in a YouTube video, “Chinese Nationalism is Westerners’ Fear.

The video accuses the West of hypocrisy. One of many examples: 1) “we tried Communism and you hated us for being Communist” and then 2) “when we embraced Capitalism you hate us for being Capitalist.” Robert Daly, Responding to Chinese Grievances posted at China Digital Times, comments on this long list. For instance, to 1) he replies: “True, more or less. And China hated America for being a capitalist liberal democracy. It was a hate- and fear-filled time all around” and 2) “Not exactly. But America does fear China, in part, because China is gaining wealth and power through following (with Chinese characteristics) prescriptions that were offered by the West.”

1. Full disclosure, Guoqi is a good friend. [↩]

Via China Digital Times a You Tube presentation for foreigners who know f****¹ all about Chinese history explaining why Tibet was, is and always will be part of China. The only really interesting thing about it in a historical sense is that when they flash a series of maps to prove the “legitimancy” of China’s claims to Tibet they give the start and end dates for the Yuan and Qing dynasties² For the Republic they only have a start date, not an end date, whereas most mainland stuff ends the Republic in 1949. Nice to see an attempt to reach out to the other side.

1. a word that is used about 20 times in this bit of scholarship [↩]
2. They have a map showing that the Ming controlled Tibet too. Did you know that? Neither did I. Learn something everyday [↩]

Have you been to the British Museum? One of the best museums in the world, largely because it contains the loot of empire, stuff the Brits brought back from all over the place, mostly from the days when archeology was more like looting. They have the Elgin Marbles which have been the source of a good deal of controversy, with the Greeks wanting it back and the Brits not wanting to return it.

One of the jewels of the BM collection is the Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang, the world’s first printed book.

Although it was “acquired” by Aurel Stein under conditions that would not pass muster today, as far as I know the Chinese have not asked for it back. This is a bit surprising to me. Part of it is that the whole reclaiming antiquities thing seems to be less common in East Asia then in the West. I think it also has to do with where things fit into the popular mind. Greeks want the Elgin Marbles back because they are masterworks of Greek art and they are Greeks. China has requested some stuff from An-yang back, but they have not, as yet, been interested in this. Maybe it’s just a matter of time before Chinese nationalists start demanding back the treasures of Chinese culture all over the world. I suspect that even then the Diamond Sutra would not be as big a deal for China since being Buddhist it may fit less well into modern Chinese conceptions of the treasures of Chinese culture than it does for westerners. It’s one of those things which seems, to me anyway, to loom larger in the foreign concept of China than the Chinese one.

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

It has been in the news of late that China has built a rail line to Tibet. It cost $3.2 billion, and the train cars have to be pressurized, but you can now get to Tibet cheaper than you could before. The official reason for this is to encourage economic development in the backward area of Tibet. The unspoken purpose is of course is to encourage Han migration and tie Tibet more closely to China. Might also help in case of war with India.

I have not seen it mentioned, but another reason to build it is because Sun Yat-sen wanted to build a railway to Tibet. Everyone who visits Nanjing learns that Sun wanted to build a bridge across the Yangzi, but that Mao did it. Carrying out the great tasks of the revolution is always something Chinese governments like to do.

After the 1911 revolution, when Yuan Shikai was made President Sun was made Minister of Railways. Yuan was chosen over Sun because Yuan was seen as a practical politician while Sun was a dreamer. Sun’s plan for railway development was quite frankly nuts, as the map below, from his collected works, shows.

Sun’s plan

In China proper he called for a network of railways that has not been built to this day. The map of Tibet is even more fantastic. I particularly like the route that goes along the border with India along, apparently, the spine of the Himalayas. This, like his net of rails in Mongolia, was intended to tie these border areas more closely to China. The era around 1911 was the age of the Rights Recovery Movement, when in addition to Chinese governments trying to hold on to every bit of sovereignty they could, non-state actors and individual citizens were supposed to do the same. All the spur lines running into Nepal seem to be laying claim to endangered territory. Most of these lines seem economically insane, but as they are more political than economic plans in the first place that is fine. The modern Tibet line is pretty much the same thing. I have no idea how much economic growth in will generate, but I’m sure it will be short of 3.2 billion. Still, Tibet is tied to the motherland, and the fact that it is economically crazy almost makes it better.

The modern line

In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in Guangdong province in the 1920’s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument about the role of guns in Chinese politics. The article as a whole attempts to get at the level of armament in the province, which is of course difficult to do. Weapons came in from all sorts of places, military weapons, local production, the British in Hong Kong trying to stir up trouble. Guangdong produced a lot of overseas sojourners (the article focuses on the Pearl River delta) and they liked to help out the folks back home by buying them guns. Although guns flowed into the province throughout the 20s prices kept going up, (locally made rifles went from 40 yuan apiece in 1912 to 170 in 1928. Prices of handguns rose more slowly) indicating that there was still lots of demand. After some speculation on total numbers of guns the authors focus on the Guomindang Canton government’s attempt to license and tax weapons. This was initially a revenue move. During the warlord period states taxed almost everything and guns were a particularly attractive thing to tax. Gradually attempts to license guns came to be more focused on denying weapons to opponents of the state, most notably the Merchant Corps of Canton, which was always difficult to control.

The most interesting thing about the article is the conclusion. The authors conclude that Guangdong did not see the emergence of really serious local oppressors, (土皇帝) or of large-scale banditry because as a fairly prosperous area it was a well-armed area. As a result it was hard for any one family to dominate a local militia and hard for the state to control the people. Thus local independence grows out of the barrel of a gun.

I’m not sure I entirely buy this. I’m not sure things in Guangdong were really that good, or that this single explanation really explains it. Guangdong does seem a good deal less disastrous than many other areas during the warlord period, but then so does the Shanghai area, and I suspect this has more to do with the presence of a major urban area than with guns per se. What I do find interesting is the almost libertarian emphasis on guns and popular power. Chinese scholarship usually seems pretty state-centered, i.e. looking from the point of view of the state at the problem of controlling the people. (Or regarding the Nationalist state as evil and assuming the existence of a Communist counter-state) I don’t have much problem with a state focus, since the process of state-building was one of the most important parts of China’s 19^th and 20^th century, but it is nice to see civil-society type ideas being applied outside Shanghai.

邱捷，何文平“1920 年代广东的民间武器” in 一九二0年代的中国，社会科学，北京， 2005

Christian Science Monitor has a substantial article about Sun Shuyan’s new book Long March (previously noted here), leadng this time with the book’s attempt to revise — erase, more or less — the Luding Bridge Incident. Part of what makes this interesting, of course, is that Chang and Halliday also claim the Dadu River crossing was a Maoist fairy-tale, based on interviews with unidentified eyewitnesses.

But there are identifiable people alive with memories of the incident, as well as other sources.

Mrs Li says there was indeed a battle. “The KMT warned us that the Reds would eat the young people and bury the old,” she said. “Many fled up the mountainside. But when we saw them, they told us not to be afraid, they only opposed bad people. I remember they were wearing straw shoes, with cloth wound around their shins.”
“The fighting started in the evening,” Mrs Li said. “There were many killed on the Red Army side. The KMT set fire to the bridge-house on the other side, to try to melt the chains, and one of the chains was cut. After it was taken, the Red Army took seven days and seven nights to cross. Later, I was told that someone we had seen was Mao Zedong.”

Oxford University’s Steve Tsang says the Chiang Kai-shek archives show the KMT chief did in fact order the senior warlord in the area to hold the crossing on pain of court martial, while his 100,000-strong Central Army tried to catch up with the Reds from the south.

Some of the Sichuan warlord’s forces arrived before the Reds at Luding, but their commander panicked as the Reds’ main force arrived. He fled, leaving behind only a few of his notoriously opium-dazed soldiers to defend the bridge. The attempt to burn the bridge could not have amounted to much, as the timbers were soaked by rain.

“The Maoist story of the battle was a lie, and a huge exaggeration but there was a battle,” Tsang said.

Sun Shuyan’s claim seems to rest partially on a negative finding: no eyewitnesses, though given that she could only find forty Long Marchers to interview after seventy years, that’s hardly proof, really. She also cites

As Gen. Li Jukui wrote 50 years later in a memo never published until last month by author Sun Shuyan in her new book, “Long March:” “This matter was not as complicated as people made it out to be later.”

Though I’m always happy to see interesting new sources enter the public realm, that sounds reasonably close to what Steve Tsang was describing above, and it may be that what Sun is “debunking” is the static Chinese Communist narrative rather than the current anglophone understanding. To be fair, I haven’t seen the book: I am loath to rely too heavily on news accounts, but I also haven’t seen any scholarly reviews yet.

Welcome to the third Asian History Carnival!

It’s traditional for blog carnivals to have some kind of internal organization…. Heh.

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I think we need a new word for the study of colonialism, imperialism and the post-colonial discourses, pro and con. Pro? Who’s in favor of it? Well, this is what makes it interesting, these days: there are a lot of former colonial powers out there whose citizens and leaders, in their heart of hearts, still believe that they accomplished something that was ultimately positive, who still believe that their developmental initiatives and their anti-communist (or anti-capitalist) positions were justified by subsequent developments. This is usually — explicitly or implicitly — intended to mitigate or cancel out any discussions of political repression, economic exploitation, military atrocities or strategic abandonment. Sometimes it’s just good historical sense, but then it usually comes with very careful caveats about not canceling out the other stuff.

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