井底之蛙

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.

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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

1. For more information on the library in English, see our EALA entry for this library here. [↩]
2. 1943-1945 大众日报, for example, is of noticeably worse quality than preceding years and even has some handwritten characters. I can only assume that the Japanese came across and destroyed or confiscated their printing press in one of their many mopping up campaigns in the province. [↩]

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

1. Tse-han Lai, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991), 74. Original source is cited as Formosa: Internal Affairs, 1945-1949, Reel 1, Enclosure no. 25 (Nov. 1, 1946, report), p. 35. Bibliography gives full citation as: United States State Department Central Files. Formosa: Internal Affairs, 1945-1949. Washington, D.C.: University Publications of America, 1985. Reel 1 (“Political Affairs Reports for 1946 and January 1947″) [↩]

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…)

1. S. Bernard Thomas, Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). [↩]
2. http://www.umkc.edu/University_Archives/INVTRY/EPS/EPS-INTRO.HTM [↩]
3. Red Star Over China (Random House 1938): 106-107. [↩]
4. Anne-Marie Brady, Making the foreign serve China: Managing foreigners in the People’s Republic (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003): 46-48; Michael Hunt, The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 1996): 236-237. David Apter and Tony Saich argue that Mao’s heroic story of Yan’an was “so powerful that it changed the way people acted, thought of themselves, and responded to others, at least for a time.” David Apter Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Harvard University Press, 1994): 9 [↩]

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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Reading through 中华民国文化史 (Cultural History of the Chinese Republic)¹ I found something interesting in the section on 国术. 国术 is a term for what today would be called 武术, i.e. martial arts. Although there was a lot of interest in physical education in China in the 20s and 30s traditional martial arts were not part of this, as they were often seen as backwards peasant stuff. The Guomindang did make some efforts to encourage the modernization of the martial arts, however, setting up the 中央国术馆 (Central Martial Arts Academy) in Nanjing in 1927. Eventually there would be provincial-level organizations as well. At first the Academy seems to have been organized like a traditional martial arts school with masters and disciples but in 1929 it was reorganized as a more modern type of school. The top rated teachers were 王子平，吴图南，姜容燕，胡容华 (女), 陈志和 (女) the younger teachers included 张文广， 李锡恩，傅淑云 (女) As the (女) indicates two of the top five teachers and three of eight were women.

This actually surprised me a lot. In movies and fiction there may be a lot of female martial arts experts, and there were certainly some in reality as well. Still, this ratio strikes me as a little high. In 1933 there was a national martial arts exam and of the 427 competitors only 9 were women. Was this part of an attempt to modernize the martial arts? Was it a regional thing, since the academy drew heavily from the Northwest and followers of 张之江? Has anybody written anything on this?

1. 编 史全生，吉林文史 [↩]

For people who have read Sherman Cochran it is not news that Chinese merchants developed brand names and consumers developed brand loyalty. Cochran mostly focuses on an earlier period (and the medicine business) but Lang Jing looks at the athletic shoe industry.¹ Lang is looking at the development of modern athletics in Shanghai. One issue he looks at is how widespread interest in modern athletics was outside of schools and national competitions and such. This is always a hard thing to find out about, but he does show that there must have been some market for Western-style sports in China, as Shanghai had a number of manufacturers of ping-pong equipment, basketballs (basketball assimilated quickly in China) and of course athletic shoes. It was in the shoe industry of course that you see advertising wars. 金刚 (jin gang)² brand shoes ran ads in the 1940s urging consumers ”勿相信牌子，相信你自己的眼睛“ (don’t trust brand names trust your own eyes) Presumably meaning they should not be taken in by advertising hype. The target of these adds was of course 回力 (Hui Li, Returning Strength), the kingpin of the Chinese shoe industry. The campaign seems to have worked, as 金刚 became a major player in athletic shoes. Perhaps it did not work well enough, however, since 回力 is still around and they are not. 回力has an interesting logo, as you can see below. I don’t think Nike can sue them however, since 回力 has been fighting sneaker wars far longer than Nike has even existed.

1. 郎淨 “近代體育在上海(1840-1937)” 上海社會 2006 p.361 [↩]
2. Golden Exactly? its hard to translate. It’s also the word used for King Kong [↩]

I found this picture on Southeast Asia Visions¹

It is from Siam and China by Besso, Salvatore (1914) I was a bit confused about what it was showing. Surely March 5 is too late for a response to the declaration of the Republic? This turned out to be an interesting bit of political theater. By February of 1912 Yuan Shikai had accepted the idea of becoming the President of the new Republic, but he was still bickering with the revolutionaries in Nanjing over where the new capital would be. The revolutionaries of course wanted Yuan to come to Nanjing where their Provisional Senate was meeting. Yuan naturally wanted to stay in Beijing and the issue was a symbolic one over which of these two groups was going to be dominant in the new government. A group of southern representatives came to Beijing to negotiate with Yuan, but on Feb 29 a mutiny broke out among Cao Kun’s troops in Beijing and the Southerners were forced to flee their hotel. Mutinies broke out in Tianjin, Baoding and Shijiazhuang the next day, all among troops loyal to Yuan. According to Jerome Chen Cao Kun’s troops were yelling slogans against Yuan moving to the South as they rioted²

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1. following a link from BibliOdyssey [↩]
2. Ch’en, Jerome. Yuan Shih-K’ai. Stanford University Press, 1972. p.107 [↩]

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. [↩]