As we are at mid-semester I thought it would be a nice time to think about Education, with a little help from Feng Zikai, Republican China’s best-known cartoonist.
Feng obviously did not think much of education in general
Education is the process of changing raw materials into something else
The people in the reading room at Shaanxi Provincial Archives are really nice and helpful and professional. Unlike some archives they will let you look at things that are not directly connected to your approved research topic. They will also let you drink tea right there in the reading room while reading documents. On the downside they have taken over half of the reading room to practice their song and dance routine for China’s upcoming 60th national day. Fortunately I, like everyone else, am so excited about the celebration that it does not bother me. I found a few documents on an American soldier who was busted for stealing cultural relics in 1945. Violation of cultural relics laws was a big problem in Shaanxi, and they have a fair number of documents on it going back to the 1930s. They don’t give his name, but apparently he was caught with an entire truckload of stuff, including 9 “Xia dynasty” bronze ding and 3 Six Dynasties Buddha images. Total value over 5 million yuan. By 1945 Americans no longer enjoyed extraterritoriality, so he was subject to Chinese law. On the other hand, members of the American military were governed by a status of forces agreement that gave them many of the same privileges. He did not cooperate or say much to his captors. I suspect if he had been caught with couple TLV mirrors in his backpack they would have just ignored it or maybe confiscated them. A truck puts him in Kelly’s Heroes territory, however, and they had to do something. Of course this guy could have regularized his actions without too much trouble. Lots of American China collections, most notably the Harvard library were built up during or right after the war by having Americans with money and official connections go around buying up everything they could get their hands on. One assumes this soldier was not digging this stuff up himself, he had Chinese accomplices (not mentioned here) who were helping him because he had lots of greenbacks. Of course that is totally different than say, Fairbank, tossing around Harvard money, since he was buying up Chinese culture in a poor and disordered country -with- official permission, and with a scholarly purpose, rather than for personal aggrandizement, and this guy was doing the opposite. Plus the soldier did not have a Ph.D. As so often happens in archives the documents end before the case is resolved. The last document is from the provincial government, asking if maybe the artifacts are fakes, perhaps as a way to sweep the incident under the rug. Too bad, since a trial might have generated more statements about what actually went down.
I heard a few China papers at ASPAC and, though they weren’t all on one panel, they might well have been, because they all dealt with the rural response to changing 20th and 21st century circumstances.
On Friday I heard Soka University’s own Xiaoxing Liu discuss rural responses to the marketization of the labor and agricultural economy in China over the last few decades. She noted that the share of Chinese workers involved in agriculture dropped below 50% in 2003, a critical landmark for modernization theorists: many former agricultural workers have become migrant laborers (more about them below) and the remaining agriculturalists have a great deal of structural and economic trouble: lack of land rights being high on the list. (more…)
There was a post up, briefly, At Edge of the American West Dana captured some of the emerging themes of the discussion [link added] on Iranian democracy, including the fact that Mousavi, from whom the election seems to have been stolen, isn’t really all that nice, liberal or different from Ahmedinajad, especially since the presidency isn’t really the seat of greatest power in Iran.1 There’s a growing call for tough talk and possibly action in support of the protesters, some of which is identifiable as neo-conservatives taking a consistent pro-interventionist line. The post then took that to the next step, noting that we have conflicts with the Iranian regime — nuclear development, Iraq influence, etc. — and that some neo-conservatives have supported military attacks on Iran as a way to force a favorable solution. Near the end of the post was the line that inspired me to respond:
The same groups rending their garments over the murder of Neda will be calling for the bombing of her relatives.2
I don’t think this is entirely true, unless “rending their garments” is supposed to indicate excessive strategic displays of grief. The fact is that the choices in the Iranian election were not all that diverse — the system limits candidates to those who have not, in any way, offended existing powers, at least not without sufficiently powerful allies to pull it off. Nonetheless many of us believe that process matters. Just as the Tiananmen protests were actually about a more open socialism, not democracy, these protests are about an honest Islamic Republic, not democracy. Still, though their rights won’t be all that much greater under Mousawi, it’s clear that their rights have been abridged radically through election fraud and violent suppression of peaceful protests.
Neda, and the others who died, were injured or arrested, deserve better than an Islamic Republic, but at the very least they deserves the preservation of an Islamic Republic.
The literature on democracy development is thin, at least in terms of convincing arguments, but the most likely precursor to actual democracy is faux democracy. It’s the habits of elections and candidates and constitutions and rights that develop under authoritarian populism that can blossom into something like real liberal (in the classical sense) democracy. This is where the example of Taiwan and South Korea is instructive, as well as the transition made by Japan in the mid-20th century. Protests rarely seem to result directly in regime change — though the Romanian and earlier Iranian examples did — but they do express the degree to which the people take their rights seriously.
Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time has been re-issued. This is good news for everyone, and especially for those of us who got a copy for Christmas. (Thanks Sis!) For a number of years all that one was likely to find even in used bookstores was the Sentry edition (1967), which re-printed only the first half of the book. The two parts of the book are the same in that they are both the stories and pictures of Peck’s wanderings in Western China during the War of Resistance. The first volume ends on December 10th, 1941, when a group of local officials come to visit him. Peck has been fairly contemptuous of Kuomintang officials throughout the book, since he regards most of them as corrupt feudal remnants with at best a thin layer of modern jargon spread over them. They in turn are convinced he must be some sort of crypto-Communist. On this occasion however they are happy to inform him that 500 American planes have bombed Tokyo and that they are now allies.
I am currently spending my days at a microfilm machine in the basement of Shandong Provincial library, looking through old wartime newspapers from occupied and civil war period Shandong.1 The publications I’m looking at are often put out of more remotely located areas not fully under Japanese control such as Yishui（沂水）.
To be given access to the old newspapers, I have to pay a fee of about $5 per reel and a few cents per photograph I snap of the microfilm machine screen, but I guess that is just the cost of doing research here (at least I’m allowed to use my camera, which one cannot assume in Asia). Their old microfilm machines aren’t the best, with usually only half of any given page fully in focus and no zoom capabilities but the lamp is brighter and the quality of the microfilm is significantly better than some of the late 1940s newspapers I have looked through in Korea’s national library. Generally, what is left of Korea’s published materials from the postwar late 40s are, as far as I can tell, in far worse condition than what I have come across here in Shandong among the Communist newspapers and documents coming out of nominally occupied zones of wartime China, with some exceptions.2
There is a much better and more powerful machine behind me, however, being used all day by a library employee. I do interrupt her at the end of each reel I look through to have her print out a few selected pages that I want a clearer image of than my camera is currently providing me with by taking pictures of the microfilm machine’s screen. Otherwise, she is slowly making her way through some of the old newspapers in their collection and taking a snapshot of each page that is then saved in the form of a TIFF image of about 200-300kb in size each. We have a similar machine (perhaps the same model) in the microfilm rooms back in the US but it is the first time I have seen it used for a full scale digitization project. Judging from her rate of coverage from the last week, she can probably go through somewhere between 1 to 3 years of issues for a newspaper per day, depending on the completeness of the collection. I estimate that she can probably go through all of the old newspapers the library has in perhaps two years or so, even if she is the only one working on this project.
Many of the newspapers and old magazines they have only exist for a few years and are missing many issues, but are really wonderful sources to have access to. She explained that when she is done the files then have to be processed and indexed by two other sections at the library but she says the eventual goal is to put these online in some form. She is currently making her way through the same newspaper I’m looking at, the Communist controlled 大众日报, and I only wish I could intercept those TIFF files before they get swallowed into the bureaucracy of the library. My experience with the Korean national library and oral history documents available here in digital form is that these wonderfully crisp and simple image files often get horribly mangled on their way to final public access by being transformed into proprietary formats that require dreadful downloaded plug-ins, Internet Explorer Active-X, special reader applications, and the like. God forbid we provide everyone with simple downloads of PDF or image files like some of the better archives and museums out there do. Sometimes issues of copyright are at fault, but that is no excuse for Japanese colonial period documents in Korea or these old wartime newspapers. I look forward to see what happens in this case and hope for the best.
In the meantime, for anyone doing research on Shandong, below are just a few picks from among just the newspapers you can currently view in their microfilm department, selected from periods I’m interested in, including some from occupied territory (often with 新民 in the title). As far as I could tell, these cannot be found listed their library’s search engine and I found a list in an old book that emerged from the drawer of the head of the microfilm division, who has been very friendly and helpful. I’m lucky I ended up in the right place. I was told by a woman working in the newspaper section at the library back in March that, “We have no newspapers from before 1949.” Since I had seen this library listed under various important entries in a master index (name escapes me for this important book) of where old publications are supposed to be located in the libraries and archives of China, I’m glad I was more stubborn this time about tracking down someone who knew what a gold mine there in fact was in their microfilm collection. The microfilm is located deep in the labyrinth of offices in the basement floor. If you wait a few years, perhaps some of these will be viewable online without, I hope, too much hassle. Ok, here is the small sampling, mostly from ’30s and ’40s offerings:
大华日报 1946.7-1948.8
渤海日报 1944.7-1950.4
大众日报（沂水）1939.6-1948.11
大众日报（济南）1950.1-2003.12
东海日报 1931.7-1937.12
华东新闻 1932.11-1948.8
济南日报 1925.11-1938.6
冀鲁豫日报 1944.7-1949.8
军民日报 1945.12-1948.10
鲁东日报 1939.1-1945.7
鲁南时报 1943.7-1948.2
鲁中大众 1945.4-1947.12
民言报 1945.10-1948.10
民众日报 1936.12-1947.1
青岛民报 1932.5-1937.7
青岛日报 1949.12-1996.12
青岛时报 1932.5-1948.6
青岛晚报 1946.7-1948.10
青岛新民报 1938.6-1944.11
山东民国日报 1929.9-1946.6
山东日报 1929.4-1936.10
山东新民报 1938.9.28-1949.9
新闻报（上海）1893.2-1949.5
烟台日报 1945.11－1947.9
Chinese worker in France
As it is 11/11 Blood and Treasure has a nice post up on Chinese laborers along with a link with lots of great pics. B&T suggests that Chinese laborers in the War are getting more attention in Europe. There has actually been less written on actuall Chinese laborers than you might think, although of course there is a lot about the Chinese intellectuals who were in France for the war.
Corruption was one of the biggest target of complaints by supporters and sworn enemies of the Chinese republic in wartime and early postwar China. This was also true for the new Chinese regime in Taiwan after Japan’s defeat and contributed to the anger among Taiwanese who sparked the 2/28 incident in 1947. Here is one example of an investigation into corruption reported in this exchange between a council member and director of Inspection Bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs in Taiwan, May 1946:
“How many persons are in the Bureau?”“There are 114 persons, of whom 23 are Japanese.”
“Are they employed on the basis of technical ability?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a person named Fan Chin-tang in the office?”
“No. He has resigned.”
“Is there a person named Hsieh Chin-chiu in the office?”
“No…yes.”
“What qualification has this person?”
“This person is a graduate of Chekiang University.”
“What official rank does this person hold?”
“Technical expert.”
“Is she your concubine?”
“Yes.”
“Fan Chin-tang, with thirty years’ technical experience, was dismissed. Why is his salary allotment still requested from the senior office?”
“Salaries for March have not yet been paid.”
“Yes. You requested the Finance Department to allot salaries for 186 persons, while in reality your staff consists of only 46 persons. The average salary is 1,200 old Taiwan dollars per person. Your total income from November through March has been 1,000,000 old Taiwan dollars.”1
Edgar Snow’s birthday is sometime this week but they can’t agree on which day it is. The 1972 obituary in the omniscient NY Times had it as July 19, 1905, as does his most careful biography1. But maybe it’s July 17 if you go with the University of Missouri Archives, which has his papers and should know. Wikipedia also has the 17th, unless somebody’s gone and changed it to the Fourth of July. 2.
Nowadays we can’t agree if Snow was a hero or a dupe — probably both — but all agree that Snow’s Red Star Over China and Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth were the two most widely read western books on China in the 1930s. They both still have some zip in them, never mind that they showed completely different Chinas. Buck portrayed a petty capitalist farm family which was age old and not in need of revolution. Snow dramatized “the intellectually sterile countryside, the dark-living peasantry….” to which the Communists, he said, “stirred to great dreams by their ’scientific knowledge,’ ” had brought to the peasant millions, “by propaganda and by action, a new conception of the state, society, and the individual.” 3
Snow’s book went off like a bombshell. Mao’s “autobiography” was the scoop, but the redefinition of his revolution in Snow’s account was even more important. The only thing it didn’t have was sex. It was travel adventure in which Snow played the intrepid explorer going where no white man had gone before.
It was well timed: The London first edition came out in October 1937 just as the Japanese Army was advancing on Nanjing, linking the China war with the global resistance to Fascism. It sold 100,000 copies.
The book was engaged: Snow, whose Irish father implanted a hatred of the British in him, was as much excited by anti-imperialism as by social liberation. Snow had mentored students who mounted the famous December 1935 demonstrations against the Japanese and was reading up on Marxism and world affairs. He adopted Chinese patriotism.
The book was news: Mao was well enough known that Time magazine referred to him in 1935 as the “Chinese Lenin” who was so sick that he had to be carried on a stretcher. But foreign accounts of the Communist movement stressed radical land revolution and anti-foreign attacks which brought the Boxers to mind. Mao rose to the top level of leadership on the Long March by “resolving the contradiction” between radical politics and the politics of survival, that is, what American politicians call triangulating.
With Snow seated on a backless stool, Mao lounged on the stone bed, once turning down his pants to scratch for an “intruder,” and in ten evening sessions told his story. The story was no more spontaneous than were FDR’s fireside chats, but it was no less masterly for having been carefully scripted and the transcript vetted and revised by Party leaders. 4
The story was a tour de force of political spin. Mao had to be both loyal to the international communist movement and a patriot, and both dedicated to China’s long term socialist revolution and an enthusiastic member of the bourgeois United Front, a move which Stalin ordered and the logic of domestic politics drew him into. He had to address the needs of his rural constituents but keep his eye on long run revolution. (more…)
I posted a piece on Asia Media (July 10 2008) which reviews Steve MacKinnon’s new book, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (University of California Press, 2008). Steve is a friend, but I think anyone would find this book not only a good read but also quite informative on a neglected turning point in modern China. It’s also a good introduction to the work in military history which has quietly transformed our understandings of China before 1949.
Steve makes the point that in this period the United Front worked and that the staggering losses were part of a heroic and in some ways quite successful military strategy. Chiang Kai-shek presided over an energetic coalition and had widespread support. The move upriver to Chongqing was heroic in much the same way as the Long March. It’s a page turning story, though quite horrifying in the descriptions of refugee life and battlefield realities. There’s also a section of photographs which do not merely illustrate but actually develop the themes of the text.
Asia Media, by the way, is run out of the UCLA Asia Institute, and is one of the useful sites for keeping up with breaking news in Asia. Every day they post links to dozens of stories in newspapers around Asia, but also the occasional commentary or review such as mine.
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