井底之蛙

Some historians have gone so far as to endorse Barak Obama for the office of President of the United States. Lots of people who seem to have very little affinity with the policy positions Obama has advanced on his website find him to be attractive. How can this be? Is not democratic politics a matter of picking the candidate whose policy positions you find most compatible and then voting for them?

Well, yes and no. At least some of choosing a president is choosing a symbol of the nation. Thus the suitably of a candidate to be a flattering self-reflection is also important. Most of the time we Americans select our politicians (if we give the matter any thought at all) on what promises they make and what things they say they will do. The moral qualities of an official are not something we worry about too much. On the other hand, we do occasionally tend to think some politicians are more than just a set of checkmarks on a list of policies¹ but rather symbols of whatever an American is (Kennedy and Reagan come to mind)
Americans seem to have problem with this, as our political language is not well suited to this type of talk. Jounalists do ask, incessantly, the silly question of which candidate you would most like to have a beer with² I think Dukakis ran an ad pointing out that politicians and beer buddies are not the same thing.

In China things are a bit easier, in part because one does not need to worry about electing leaders all the time and in part because traditionally Chinese politics had a lot to do with moral qualities. One of these is friendship, which is both one of the five bonds of Confucianism and crucial to understanding much of Chinese political history. Somebody said that nations do not have permanent friends, only permanent interests, but members of the Chinese elite did have friends. Wyatt talks a lot about the role of friendship in The Recluse of Loyang, a study of Shao Yung (1011-1077) whose political role in the Song centered around his friendship with powerful men and their desire to be friends with a man like Shao Yung. As Shao put it in a 1074 poem

A man mustn’t seek his reflection in flowing water;

He must seek it in water that is still.

Flowing water has no fixed form,

While sill water provides a fixed entity.

 

[But] neither should a man seek his reflection in water [at all].

He should seek his reflection in other men.

Water’s mirror may show a man’s face,

But a human mirror exposes a man’s spirit.

(Wyatt)This poem encapsulates a code that is simultaneously exclusionist and yet immanently social. Shao the recluse could not conceive of passing through life alone; still, he was unwilling to settle for anything less than full perfectibility in his prime relationships.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of Obama by this website, Shao Yung, or myself, but I think this poem does a lot to explain the Obama phenomena. Much better to look in the mirror and see Obama then to see (insert name here.) I suspect that democratic politics in China, if it ever comes to be, will be rather different than that in the U.S.

For Su Fei’s Chinese take on American politics look here.

1. As Mitt Romney is discovering [↩]
2. Bush, obviously. Being rich he would pay and as he does not drink I would get both beers. [↩]

There are a few places to go for archived syllabi — H-Net, ExEAS, I had a printed collection at one point, as well, then there’s the GMU Syllabus Finder — but not a lot of open discussion of course design. I’ve gotten help on sources, etc., from lists like H-Asia or by blogging questions (”bleg” means to “beg via blog” but it looks like “blech” to me so I won’t use it) and bothering old friends. But we need a more sustained discussion. So I’m going to inaugurate what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts here (and the other blogs about syllabi I’ve designed or am working on.

My only Asian history syllabus this semester is Hist 312: China I: Early China. It covers China up to about 1600: China II is Qing, including the Ming-Qing transition; China III is 20th century.

Early China is a great course: I keep toying with the idea of making it the one required Asian course for history majors, because the material is so fundamental, and it’s my best-attended China course by far. The problem, of course, is the richness and range of the material. This semester, though, I’m not even trying to make the semester “flow” because the history itself doesn’t. It’s episodic and inconsistent and the emphasis has to shift to make sense of things.

(more…)

I didn’t make a big thing of it in class, and nobody seems to have noticed the discrepancy, but there’s something of a disparity between my World History textbook (Brummet, et al., Civilization: Past and Present, 11e) and my own understanding of the development of Neo-Confucianism. Now that the semester’s (almost) over, I’d like to throw it open for comment.

My understanding, based in no small part on the new editions of the Columbia Sourcebooks, is that Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi were largely in agreement on the matter of li [principle] and qi [essence, force, energy, etc.], but that Cheng Yi emphasized qi as the most important consideration in personal development while Cheng Hao emphasized jen [humaneness] as the key to education and moral understanding. Zhu Xi, then, while a student of both brothers, was more a follower of Cheng Yi, focusing on the function of qi; thus the term Cheng-Zhu Confucianism.

Cheng Hao, on the other hand, was the progenitor of the Cheng-Lu strain, emphasizing, along with Lu Xiangshan, the unity of xin [mind, soul, heart, etc] with the Ultimate substrate of existence and the li principle. This is important particularly because it’s the foundation for the development of Wang Yangming thought, which was very influential in Japan.

Civilization, though, puts the Cheng brothers together as developers of li-qi theory, and claims that Zhu Xi “differed from the Chengs by ascribing greater importance to li over qi and by positing the existence of a Supreme Ultimate to which all li was connected.” (304)

Am I splitting hairs to see the textbook as oversimplifying to the point of error? How do you teach the Song Renaissance?