井底之蛙

How did the modern Chinese historians create a national history? One aspect of this is the creation of protohistory, explaining what was going on in a place before there was much of a recorded history. This was a big problem in Europe in the 19th century. Having cut loose from the biblical narrative there were a lot of years to fill up, very little archaeological evidence, some vague references in classical works and a host of stories about ancient heroes. (Did you know that Adam was actually buried in England? I think Aeneas visited too.) A lot of work went into creating a reasonably accurate narrative of European protohistory, much of it built around successive waves of invaders.

Chinese historians took to this problem surprisingly well. Before the Qing there was not much on the origins of China, as distinct from the origins of civilization, although they did have a longer timeline and plenty of stories to fit in there. Liu Shipei and Zhang Binglin were both believers in the “Western origins” theory which held that the Chinese had originally been called the Baks and came from Mesopotamia. They roamed around Central Asia for a while then, under the leadership of Huangdi, they moved into the Yellow River valley, displaced the Miao and started calling themselves Han.

I get this from Peter Zarrow¹ who says that it was a popular theory in the late Qing, especially with anti-Manchu revolutionaries (trying to draw a more clear divide between the Manchus and the Han?) but he does not know much about it.²  It strikes me as possibly having been influenced  by missionary writings, given that 19th century people seem (to my limited knowledge) very wrapped up in  tying their protohistory to the Bible and the Middle East (The first Irish person, for instance, was Cessair, the granddaughter of Noah). It certainly does not seem to have had much influence in the present, when popular understanding of Chinese history is pretty anti-diffusionist.

*and the rise of the sons of Aryas, obviously

1. ”The New Schools and National Identity: Chinese History Textbooks in the Late Qing” in Hon, Tze-Ki, and Robert J. Culp. The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China. BRILL, 2007. [↩]
2. he cites a couple of Taiwan articles I will try to get hold of [↩]

The Needham Question is hot, hot, hot! Thanks to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom¹, everyone who’s everyone is talking about China’s “failure” in the face of Western intellectual and technological revolutions.

While it’s kind of nice to see a China scholar like Needham getting the pop culture treatment, and the questions he raised are still worth pursuing, the reviews suggest that the emphasis on “Eccentric” is pretty severe. They also suggest that Winchester’s biographical emphasis has left him with the wrong impression about the body of work which Needham’s intellectual descendants still do. Andrew Leonard writes:

In the epilogue, Winchester asserts that the consensus opinion of current Sinologists is that “China, basically, stopped trying.” That’s too facile a summation when one is writing a biography of a man who devoted his entire life to understanding why China failed to capitalize on thousands of years of scientific and technological innovation. Winchester then skips through the main contending theories that attempt to explain China’s failure: China’s bureaucracy siphoned talent away from a potentially entrepreneurial merchant class, China did not have the spur to competition that Europe’s many warring states inflicted on each other, China’s totalitarian government quashed initiative.

In fact, as I wrote in response to Winchester’s NYT op-ed²:

This is a rehashing of old views of China that inspired the great “Needham Question”³: “Why didn’t China have a Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution”? Half a century of scholarship has produced a massive aggregation of knowledge about science and technology in China which shows, among other things, that scientific and technical progress continued throughout the early modern period (which, started a half millenium earlier in China than in the West) but that China’s population obviated the need for the kind of massive “labor saving” capital equipment, so industrial production moved in other directions.

China was also experiencing a scientific flourishing in the Qing era, featuring fields from philology to botany.⁴

China doesn’t “fall behind” until around 1800, when the steam power revolution put England a quantum leap ahead of the pack. It then went through about 150 years of political turmoil in which economic and technical development often took a back seat to other issues, including imperialism, uprisings, revolutions, warlords…. [ellipsis in original; it's a bad habit]

The assumption that the Western model is “natural” or somehow inevitable unless someone “fails” to achieve it is patently absurd. Europe spent centuries in the shadow of the rest of the world before catching up in their Early Modern age (with the aid of a lot of imported Chinese technology), and finally, as Paul Kennedy (among others) argued, pulling ahead due to competitive pressures and (in the case of the British steam revolution) a certain amount of luck.

The upshot of the Needham tradition scholarship, as I understand it, is that it was more macroeconomic and political problems than technological skills which resulted in China’s “lost ground” in the modern age, but a significant component of it was historical contingency (or “dumb luck,” as we used to say). Nothing inevitable about it, and nothing fundamental. China wasn’t the only great Early Modern empire to flounder in the modern age — in fact, it was more the norm than the exception, as the Ottomans, Russians, Mughals, Iberians and Hapsburgs show. “The West” wasn’t a terribly coherent entity — especially not organizationally! — and contrasting “it” with China without a little consciousness of the internal tensions, backwards regions, and failures contained within the Western tradition makes no sense, intellectually, historically or politically.

1. is that subtitle a 19th century classic, or what? [↩]
2. Which my colleague, Alan Baumler, aptly dismissed with “Don’t get me started.” [↩]
3. I did not, when I wrote this, realize that Winchester was the author of a Needham biography [↩]
4. The term kaozheng escaped me until later [↩]

Via BibliOdyssey an exhibition of the prints of the 1911 revolution from Princeton.

The prints are great, if a little small. One thing that struck me was the disclaimer at the bottom of the first page. “The Princeton East Asian Library in no way supports the rhetoric or depictions that are presented on the prints.”

What is that supposed to mean? I can think of two possibilites.

1. As a notoriously conservative institution¹ Princeton is opposed to the overthrow  of the Qing dynasty and is still hoping for the return of the Manchus.

2. Something other reason. But what could it be?

1. How many Princeton alums does it take to change a lightbulb?

   Four. One to change the bulb and three to point out how much better the old bulb was. [↩]

Shanghaist among others reports on Asia’s growing rice crisis. Well, actually it’s only a crisis if you are trying to live on less than a dollar a day. Much of the world is trying to do this of course, which has led to rice riots. For historians rice riots call up lots of associations. Although the modern neo-liberal state does not much concern itself with guaranteeing the food security of its people lots of pre-modern states did, and the Chinese Late Imperial state in particular was obsessed with stabilizing the price of grain, hence the ever-normal granaries. A lot of Asian states are currently trying to find ways to up grain production for next year, banning exports of grain, fixing prices and scrounging around for extra supplies. There has been a fair amount of popular violence, in the long tradition of food riots, which are usually focused on forcing sales at a “fair” price or preventing exports of local supplies. In America Sam’s Club is limiting rice purchases. No doubt this will make the W.T.O. grumpy, since we should be entering the glorious era of the universal free market.

Free markets vs. paternalism/meddling is often presented as one of the big traditional/modern dichotomies. Actually, even in China officials have a long history of relying on market mechanisms to deal with food problems. Although Confucian officials have long had a reputation in the West for being anti-commercial this not very accurate. According to Rowe¹

Qing provisioning policy might be divided into the following five strategies (listed
in roughly ascending order of controversiality): (1) attacking extravagance and encouraging frugality, on the part of both government and society; (2) encouraging increased food production; (3) promoting maximum commercial circulation of grain;(4) attempting to meet sporadic and localized food crises through administrative means; and (5) maintaining large permanent stocks of grain in government hands as leverage to control local availability of grain on a routine basis. …

Chen Hongmu did not see encouraging commerce as betraying the classical tradition as he showed in his letter to Fang Bao

“The pervasive dilemma today is that the price of rice is high and the people are too
poor to afford it. But if those who seek to deal with this lack an overall conception of
the problem, they will never be able to come up with a comprehensive policy approach
to resolve it. This overall concept is none other than the Way of Producing Wealth
[shengcai], identified in the Great Learning and repeated by Mencius: “Open the well-
spring and restrict its flow [kaiyuan jieliu}" [i.e., produce more and consume less].”

Chen Hongmu was Qing China’s chief provincial-level troubleshooter felt that the most important method of dealing with famine was “relief through commercial circulation”. One of his main concerns was avoiding any state or private action that would cut off the flow of grain. Rowe emphasizes his reliance on market forces. For instance in 1743 when dearth occurred in Jiangxi he dealt with the situation by loaning a large sum of state money to pawnshops, in other words pumping more liquidity into the commercial economy, much as the American Federal Reserve would do today. As Rowe points out “however ‘liberal’ such promarket policies might appear, there were by no means laissez-faire. The objective was less one of letting the market accomplish its task than of making it do so” (p.162) He was certainly a moralizer and willing to nag (or force) people to stop wasting land on tobacco or grain on alcohol. He was also very big on encouraging increased production and such. Chen did not share the modern world’s market idolatry, nor was he willing to question the Confucian imperative to care for the poor.

So how would Asia’s current responses to the rice crisis rate with Chen Hongmu? Any comments from readers would be welcome as I am not following this as closely as some, but it seems that China is taking a pretty free-market approach, not doing anything radical² and assuming that they have enough cash on hand to maintain a low price on rice. China, at least, seems to have moved a bit beyond the historical phase where states worried about grain supplies.

UPDATE

Here is an angle I had not thought of. Sexy Beijing has been interviewing Chinese consumers about increasing prices. They also talk to some shopkeepers who are finding business off. One woman then interviewed at the end of the clip below said that if the dofu-selling business keeps getting worse she may go back home and return to farming. Chen Hongmu was alway worried about famine causing peasants to flee the land, but this price increase may have the opposite effect.

1. Rowe, William. Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China. Stanford University Press, 2001. [↩]
2. China has not restricted rice exports, but they were not a top exporter anyway [↩]

As today is Darwin Day I thought I would post something on China’s reception of Darwin’s work. He tended to be confused with Spencer at first, and Elman gives some examples of how his work continued to be misunderstood for a very long time. Still, it is not surprising that Chinese tended to see Darwin through Spencer. Spencer was big in the West, and for those obsessed with the survival of nations rather than the survival of species Spencer would seem more to the point. Yan Fu’s On Strength first appeared in 1895 and was the first serious account of Darwin published in China.

Darwin is an English biologist. Heir to his family’s scholarly traditions, he traveled around the world as a young man, amassing a rich collection of rare and curious plants and animals. After several decades’ exhaustive and subtle reflection upon them, he wrote The Origin of Species. Since the publication of this book, of which nearly every household in Europe and America now has a copy, there has been a tremendous change in the scholarship, politics, and religion of the West. The claim that the revolution in outlook and intellectual orientation occasioned by Darwin’s book exceeds that of Newtonian astronomy is hardly an empty one.

His book says that for all their diversity, the species originated from a single source and that their differences developed slowly, for the most part in connec­tion with changes in the environment and an abiding biological tendency to­ward incremental differentiation. Eventually divergence from the remote source led to vast and irreversible differences, but these were brought about by natural processes in later ages and were not inherent in life at its origins.

Two chapters of the book are particularly noteworthy. . . . One is called “Competition” and the other, “Natural Selection.” “Competition” refers to the struggle of things to survive, and “Natural Selection” is the retention of the fit. The idea is that people and things exist in profusion, surviving on what the natural environment provides, but when they encounter others, peoples and things struggle over the means of survival. At first species struggled with species, and when they advanced somewhat, one group (jun) struggled with another.

Not bad, in my opinion, although I think he may overestimate Darwin’s sales figures a bit. At the end of this reading he is already leaving Darwin’s interest in species to look at the competition among “groups.” Here he is pretty clearly influenced by Spencer

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Via Kevin Drum (where the comments so far are better than you might expect) a link to an article by Christina Larson in the new Washington Monthly about environmentalism in China. It’s a nice piece, although not much of it will be terribly new for the Old China Hands who read this blog.

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One of the classes I will be doing next semester is History 200, Introduction to History, which is our methods course for majors, usually taken when they are sophomores. This time I will be using Cohen’s History in Three Keys as the monograph we all read together. I picked it first because it is a good read,¹ second because he is quite open about explaining how historians create a book like this, what their goals are and what problems they face, and third because it is a book that is easy to tie into non-China things. Most of these students will not end up ‘concentrating’ on Asia (which is fine) and I don’t like to get too Sinocentric on them in this class.

Cohen’s book is about the Boxers, which means that it connects to all sorts of issues about Imperialism and Colonialism and Missionaries and Cultural Contact and all that. Plus lots of people wrote stuff about it in English, so it is easy for the students to do a bit of primary source research. The tool I will be using for that is Diigo which is social annotation software that allows a defined group of people to “add” comments to any document on the web. Ideally we well be able to read and comment on a set of documents “together” in a big group (two sections of 20 this time) just as we would do in reading a document one-on-one, and they will learn how historians read primary sources and what we get out of them.  Any advice on how to pull this off is welcome.

One of the things we will be reading is Twain’s To The Person Sitting in Darkness which is more about American imperialism than the Boxers, and maybe something from Weale’s Indiscreet Letters from Peking and then turn them loose in the NY Times Archive. Do any of our readers know of any good (translated) European or Japanese accounts of the Boxer events, the siege, etc?

1. by historian standards anyway. Some of them will get very frustrated by his unwillingness to Just Tell The Damn Story, but part of the purpose of the class is to introduce students to some of the other things historians do [↩]

From Oddnumbers¹ a post on historical income inequality, which is based on this paper

One of the things that they conclude is that China in the 188o’s was the second most egalitarian society in their sample, coming out with a Gini coefficient that is just behind that of modern Denmark

This is not actually all that surprising. As the authors point out hunter-gatherer societies are by their nature almost completely egalitarian. In the case of China the lack of a hereditary land-holding aristocracy would apparently make reduce the possibility of radical inequality like you find in Nueva Espana.² The authors, however, are more interested in their new concept of inequality extraction ratio. Basically, they want to figure out what amount of the total surplus is in fact being extracted from those at the bottom. As societies get richer there is more surplus that could be extracted.  They hint that raw inequality is not as likely to create social unrest as a rising ratio, i.e. if the elite is taking a bigger cut of the possible pie. China seems to be very low on its possible ratio, and thus the elite was taking as small an amount of surplus as could be imagined.

Given that their only source on China is Chang Chung-li’s work from the early 60’s I suspect that they might get very different results with better data. Still, I find this interesting. They seem to assume that states are controlled by the elite and are machines for extracting wealth from the bottom classes. This seems to be at least some confirmation that Confucian rhetoric about caring about the well-being of the peasants had at least some effect on society.

1. via Matthew Yglesias [↩]
2. I have problems with the ’social tables’ they use for their pre-modern data, but I think I agree that differences between classes are more important than those within classes. The authors themselves point out that the data on China is taken from studies of the Chinese “gentry” a massive 2% of the population, unlike other places were work is done on real aristocrats. [↩]

I posted a while back on how the Chinese are more aggressive in re-building historical sites than one would expect in the West. Angela Zito explains some possible the reasons for this. Cities were architectural representations of the harmonious order the emperor was imposing on the cosmos, and thus re-building them was one of the things emperors did.

the building and rebuilding of the city also actuated again and again in the act of construction the cosmic principles of the city’s design. Thus a new dynasty inevitably signaled the emergence of order from chaos by building projects. Later, the continuous “restoration” (xiu) of the architecture of one’s fore bearers combined filial respect with sagely rescue of pattern from decay. (p.133)

In a footnote she claims that the government of the PRC thinks like this and their “notion of preservation ..emphasizes the metaphysical whole of a building rather than its material parts. As long as these are faithfully reproduced in situ, guidebooks and local people will inevitably report that the building is ‘original’” I think this is an interesting insight, but I’m not sure I entirely agree with it. I think she is right in saying that re-building was important traditionally because it displayed the ruler (or the local elite) as creators of cosmic order. To just leave things alone was to leave them in the past, and since these things are not yet museum-ized in China (to use Levenson’s term) you almost have to fiddle with them.

I’m not sure that something has to be in situ or all that faithfully reconstructed. To some extent this is true of any site anywhere. Mount Vernon has been painted any number of times since Washington died, and I suppose that other than the main timbers most of the wood has been replaced. If authority says this is it than this is it, for most purposes. This is the throne of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Nanjing

I know of no pictures of what the Taiping throne looked like, and I am sure that not a single ounce of wood in this thing is “authentic” and yet here(Nanjing) it is. I wonder if part of what encourages this manic reconstruction is, as Zito claims, a desire to make the state look like preservers of the patterns of the universe, or of this case the past. Given the Communists’ role in destroying so much of the fabric of China’s history they may feel that it is particularly important to reconstruct the past.

Jeremiah from Granite Studio has  post about the debate in American universities about the relationship between education and training. Anthony Kronman claims that American universities spend far too little time teaching students about the meaning of life and far too much time doing research and teaching people how to have successfully careers. Kronman claims that our reluctance to teach students the meaning of life has weakened the humanities and made us subject to “being hijacked for political ends” He is particularly hard on how America’s humanities faculty have ceded their position to those in the university who value research and careerism (which is sort of rich coming from the dean of Yale Law School) and longs for the return of the pre-1870 university with its single, coherent curriculum, clear moral sense, and lack of interest in either the German innovation of research or the modern American consumerist idea of students choosing their own majors. Lots of people in America talk like this, but I find most of this sort of rhetoric to be faux-nostalgic blovating. I actually think education as opposed to training is important, and I’m glad places like St. John’s, Wheaton College and Northland exist, and I’m glad many students at other schools learn things beyond preparing for a career, even if they were not planning on it. but I can’t imagine a national Ministry of Higher Education forcing the current American higher-ed system in a pre-1870 direction.

Jeremiah claims that looking at China is worthwhile when thinking about this (which I agree with), and Chinese intellectuals spent an awful lot of time talking about the purposes of education and above all the relationship between education as moral cultivation and education as getting and doing a job. In fact Chinese scholars talked so much about this I am going to limit myself to one figure, Zeng Guofan.¹ Zeng one of the most important provincial officials of the mid-19th century and responsible for putting down the Taiping Rebellion and restoring the fortunes of the Qing dynasty. As patriarch of his family he also left a lot of writings about proper education and its purposes. Of course many of the educational debates of the Late Imperial period seem to have little contact with ours. The debate on the role of philosophy vs. literary skill, learning of the mind vs. learning of the heart, etc. all of these seem rather distant to us. Like Anthony Kronman, however Zeng thought education had two purposes, to advance virtue and to prepare for a vocation. In his case the vocation was government service and the gateway to government service was the exams and the 8-legged essay. The 8-legged format could be and was criticized for encouraging students to strip-mine the classics for clever tidbits they could toss into their essays. Some would say it was possible to have a good career without really becoming a good person. Zeng, of course did not see it that way, as he did not draw a sharp divide between exam learning and moral learning. The exams really tested your worthiness, in his view. If you could write a good 8-legged essay you were a good person, and fit for government work.² If you were successful at learning it would help you even if you were not lucky enough to pass the exams and instead had to work as a private secretary or a teacher.

If the farmer works hard at plowing, there may still be famines, but there will surely be years of good harvest. If the merchant adds to his stock of merchandise, there may be times when sales are slow, but there will surely be times when the market in unimpeded. If the scholar is excellent in his vocation, how could it be that he will never obtain a degree? Even if he never obtains one, are there not other paths to livelihood? Therefore, the problem lies in one’s not being excellent in work.

If you did not want an official career, like his son Qihong, study became even more important as the road to happiness.

Since you are not interested in degrees and positions with emolument, you must read more of the ancient books. You should frequently hum verses and practice calligraphy so as to foster character an sentiment; there will be enjoyment in store for you for your lifetime and to spare

Our modern attempts to make students value study as a road to joy have not seen much success, and I don’t think anyone today sees a direct connection between moral education and landing a job. Zeng certainly did, and would have seen little point to a division between Gen Ed and a major, or worse still a multiplicity of majors. He did recognize the importance of specialization, but in an almost religious sort of way. One should start a text, and read through it carefully, stopping and re-reading any sentences that puzzled you until you understood them and then moving on. On should read only one book at a time. This is entirely different from the way we encourage students to approach texts. We encourage them to mine them for the information they want, molding texts to their purposes rather than assuming that texts are things that they should mold themselves onto

Zeng admonished his family to study, but backed up his words by continuing his studies throughout his life. Like most literati he practiced his calligraphy daily, and throughout the war years he continued work on his Random selections from the Classics, history and various writers. He apparently though that liberal study was part a life-long process of self-cultivation, which is not usual with us. I rather doubt Anthony Kronman is showing up at the freshman seminars at Yale in hopes of becoming a better person and dean.³

This is just China, of course, but I think the Western model of education before 1870 has a lot in common with this. You really can’t have meaning of life education without a common agreement on what the good life is and a society which values those who have learned about it. We just don’t have that and are not going to any time soon. This is a capitalist society, and universities sell what people want to buy Student demand drives what is produced in American Higher Ed, and will for the foreseeable future. I’m glad almost every college in America has some sort of baseline Gen Ed program (our concession to the meaning of life), and while I may disagree with how some of them are run, I also realize that liberal education is a poor sister to the football team and the Law School and always will be. American students will always be able to choose a major, rather than having the proper course decreed for them,

Ours is also at least rhetorically an egalitarian society, and it’s hard to see where the teachers for meaning of life education would come from. For Zeng Guofan this was not a problem. He increasingly came to be free of doubts, and was quite willing to set himself up as a sage, and in fact this was the point of traditional education. As Confucius put it, only the ren can love or hate others, i.e. the point of education is to reach the level where you are a superior being who can judge others. I for one would feel quite reluctant to grade students in a Meaning Of Life class. I can certainly assess how well students can explain the Self-Strengthening movement, or how well they write, but to award someone a B- in Meaning of Life would seem to be antithetical to most of what I think a faculty member should be. Not everyone thinks like this, of course. Nabakov’s vision of a college with “murals displaying recognizable members of the faculty in the act of passing on the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur” is popular it its way with a lot of faculty but most of them seem to be people like Ward Churchill. Churchill is criticized for politicized teaching, and Kronman claims to oppose that, but I don’t see how you can square non-politicized teaching with knowing the meaning of life. Zeng Guofan certainly thought students were learning how to be better people outside the classroom and would have had no problem judging them on how they behaved outside class.

I think liberal education is important, and I am happy that so many of our students seem to be getting it despite our repeated failures to figure out what it is or how to teach it. I don’t think that abstract wishing for the pre 1870 world is much help, however. While we may draw on old ideas about education and the Good Life we have to think seriously about the context these ideas came out of and how we have to adopt them.

1. I will also limit myself to one source on him, Kwang-Ching Liu “Education for Its Own Sake: Notes on Tseng Kuo-fan’s Family Letters” from Elman and Woodside eds. Education and Society in Late Imperial China California U.P, 1994 [↩]
2. Even Zeng came to doubt that the 8-legged format could embrace all knowledge, but he never became Wu Jingzi [↩]
3. I could be wrong about that, of course [↩]