井底之蛙

If you were wondering how different the new Ma government in Taiwan would be from the DPP government it is replacing you should go read Michael Turton’s analysis of Ma’s inauguration speech. (Given in Chinese (I assume Mandarin) with an English translation displayed at the same time)

Ma spends a good deal of time taking digs at his predecessors and promising vague but wonderful things for the future, as is typical is speeches like this. He also refers to the people of Taiwan as part of the 中華民族, rather than 国民 or citizens. How to translate 中華民族? I suppose the most literal way would be “Chinese race” although “Chinese ethnicity” probably sounds better. Both in Taiwan (at least under the KMT) and on the Mainland governments would claim that this “Chinese race” includes ethnic minorities. And, as some of Michael’s commenters point out there are more explicitly Han chauvinist terms he could have used, like 漢族. Still, it is hard to disagree with Michael or with the KMT aboriginal legislator who walked out of of the speech that this term is a lot less welcoming to non-Chinese that the 国民 that the DPP preferred. I also found it sort of interesting that he explicitly outed himself as a mainlander. “Taiwan is not my birthplace, but it is where I was raised and the resting place of my family. I am forever grateful to society for accepting and nurturing this post-war immigrant.” 英九雖然不是在台灣出生，但台灣是我成長的故鄉，是我親人埋骨的所在。我尤其感念台灣社會對我這樣一個戰後新移民的包容之義、栽培之恩與擁抱之情 I thought this was sort of weird. Yes, he is a mainlander, but it seems odd to bring it up,¹ unless he is trying to tie himself more firmly to China. If he pisses off the aborigines that might create trouble. If he goes so far as to piss off the non-mainlanders (whom I guess I would define as people who speak Tai-yu first) he could have real trouble.²

He clearly -is- trying to butter up ‘China’, although it is not clear how much this will involve throwing ‘Taiwan’ under the bus. Maybe a lot. “In resolving cross-strait issues, what matters is not sovereignty but core values and way of life” This is actually pretty scary, in that the Taiwan government seems to be at least downplaying and perhaps abandoning entirely the ROC’s claims to sovereignty, and looking to a common ‘Confucian’ culture. At least for Ma Taiwan seems much more part of Greater China than it was before.

1. even though he does say he was an immigrant, thus sort of implying that Taiwan is not the same as China. Maybe this is an olive branch to the less China-y types out there [↩]
2. I studied in Taiwan ages ago when the old Taiwanese-Mainlander split was fading rapidly, and I find it hard to imagine he is trying to revive it [↩]

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 [↩]

From Michael Turton.

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 Japan Focus has a nice article by Anne Booth on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan (and Korea) The standard view is that the post-war development of both places has a lot to do with the economic transformation created under colonialism. Booth compares Taiwan and South Korea to the European colonies in S.E. Asia and finds very little systematic difference. Yes, Taiwan did double its value added in agriculture, and both places were insulated from the Great Depression more than the European colonies, but the Japanese colonies do not consistently stand out. She looks at a lot of other data, but here are her 1938 GDP per capita figures

Philippines 1522

Korea        1459

Malaya      1361

Taiwan      1302

Indonesia  1175

Thailand      826

Burma         749

I don’t have much to say about it, but it is an interesting paper.

Via Michael Turton

One of my colleagues asked me a question about Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times. For those of you who have not seen it, it is a set of three love stories all set on Taiwan with the same two actors, one in 1966, one in 1911 and one in 2005. She had a question about the middle story. In this segment the female lead (Shu Qi 舒淇) works in a fairly high class brothel, and the story revolves around the possibility that Chang Chen (張震) will buy out her contract. He is portrayed as an idealistic young man who is opposed to concubinage and is tied up with the idealistic Mr. Liang (I assume Liang Qichao).My colleague asked me how accurate the movie’s portrayal of Taiwanese politics was. I was a bit stumped by that.

Visually at least it was hard for me to see the middle segment as being Taiwan in 1911. It was all interior shots in the brothel, so I suppose you would not expect to see some of the signs of colonial rule. On the other hand.

-The male lead wears a queue. Would a follower of Liang Qichao outside China in 1911 have done that? I know that in some contexts on Taiwan keeping the queue was a sign of anti-japanese feeling, but obviously cutting it off was a sign of being a radical modernizer, which is what he seems to be. Is this a mistake or was Taiwan different?

-When one courtesan is sold the contract is in Chinese. Would a legal contract have been in Japanese by that point? (I did not see the date on it )

-The only signs of Japanese rule or of any change at all is that the money used to buy the one girl is Japanese-issued money.

I was just bothered by that fact that the whole segment (physically at least) could have been set in 1860 or 1720 for that matter. Both of the other segments had a strong sense of place and time, but not this one. It seemed to me like a timeless “traditional China” with the date of 1911 stuck on it. Did anyone else get this impression, or am I ignorant of the material culture of Colonial Taiwan? Or was there some point Hou was trying to make that I am missing?

A hunting parting in Xinzhu, 1935

A great new resource provided by Paul Barclay of Lafayette College. They have digitized a great collection of photos of colonial-era Taiwan. It is very well organized with clear and complete descriptions of each image. A wonderful resource for both research and teaching.

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Jonathan Benda reports on a talk by the historian Yang Tianshi on Chiang Kai-Shek’s diaries given at Tunghai university in Taiwan. Professor Yang is a very well published and respected historian, and I had a chance to meet him when he was the chairman of the Chinese delegation to the Third International Conference on Wartime China held in Hakone in November, 2006 that brought together Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and North American historians to discuss issues related to the Sino-Japanese war.

According to Benda’s notes on the talk, Professor Yang argues that Chiang’s diaries were primarily written for himself, rather than written with his future legacy in mind.

He said that two key pieces of evidence for this are how much CKS cursed (罵) people close to him, and how much private, even confessional, material is in the diaries. (CKS used to give himself demerits for looking lustily at women.) Prof. Yang argued that CKS would not have wanted this kind of material to be made public…One result of the private nature of Chiang’s diaries, according to Prof. Yang, is that we can learn a lot more about what was really going on in CKS’s head at certain important historical moments, such as the 1926 Zhongshan Warship Incident and the 1936 Xi’an Incident.

I find this quite interesting since I have seen the diaries used in quite a number of places and whenever I have heard them mentioned in presentations, it is usually accompanied by warnings about the care that needs to be taken when using the source.

The first thing thing this makes me wonder is why, if Chiang was concerned about the confessional material and other damaging contents ever becoming public, he did not take better care to destroy what must have amounted to a huge amount of material (if the diaries indeed covered the period 1915-1972)? Surely the great generalissimo must have suspected these diaries would get into the hands of someone following his death and get published? Were there secret orders for them all to be burned that were betrayed following his death? Sounds like there could be a great story here.

Second, given Chiang’s exposure to Christian, Western, and Japanese historical, military, and political traditions and heroes that are filled with the diaries, memoirs, etc. of great leaders – I really find it very difficult to believe that Chiang could have put pen to paper every time he made a diary entry and not ever have imagined his words were speaking to an audience larger than one. Although I haven’t come across it myself, I suspect there is a whole theoretical literature among historians and literary scholars on the topic of diaries, their authors, and their conscious or unconscious audience.

I would venture to suggest that it is really difficult for an author, writing something like a diary – or a weblog, for that matter, to maintain a consistent audience in mind across a large span of time. Let me give a few examples. I have a public personal weblog that mixes postings about my own life with my thoughts on more academic and political topics. When I write, I try to imagine that my own graduate advisor or a future hiring committee is reading every posting (I honestly hope they don’t and won’t). The idea is that this way I don’t write anything that would be inappropriate for the widest possible audience. This is the reverse of what Professor Yang is arguing. However, going back over my entries, I notice that over the past few years, I see numerous postings where I slip, where I can tell that I was writing a posting which had a much smaller audience in mind – and though not too embarrassing, is probably not the kind of thing I would written if I really was imagining that hiring committee or advisor reading it.

Isn’t the opposite quite common too? Maybe I’m on my own here, but I don’t think I have ever been able to write a diary entry in my life where the thought hasn’t occasionally crossed my mind: won’t someone else someday somewhere possibly see what I wrote? Are there really people out there, especially ambitious military and political leaders, who are so confident that they are the one eternal and only audience for their writing? I suspect that at the very least, CKS suffered from the kinds of “lapses” that I mentioned above – a kind of “audience” slippage in his writing.

Finally, as a historian, we must confront the issue of what it means to know what is “in someone’s head.” The issue of diary audience notwithstanding, the actions, intentions, and opinions of someone like CKS caught in the Xi’an Incident, for example, inevitably goes through a form of translation as he puts his thoughts to paper. Diaries are not written thoughts, they are narrated thoughts. While what is put on paper in this manner does not lose historical value – we might want to be careful in how to articulate what it is that we have found. I didn’t hear Professor Yang’s talk or how exactly he expressed these ideas but it sounds like it was a fascinating discussion of an important historical source. I’m curious what others have to say about some of these issues surrounding the diaries of leaders like CKS?

UPDATE: Jonathan records another interesting comment by Professor Yang: “One last thing that Prof. Yang mentioned–he said that Chiang’s status has risen in China from that of a devil (鬼) to a human (人), while in Taiwan, coincidentally, it seems his status has gone from god to human. (No one commented on the immediate political conditions that might be responsible for that coincidence.)” On this point, Sayaka over at Prison Notebooks has an interesting posting worth checking out.

I’m going to be teaching my 20th century China class for the second time in the Spring, and I still haven’t figured out how to handle Taiwan to my satisfaction. Ideally, I’d assign one of the new survey histories — Taiwan: A New History is in my office somewhere — but it’s enough work getting through the books I already assign with my students. Spence, for all his virtues, doesn’t really do Taiwan any justice in the later sections of The Search for Modern China¹ so something needs to be done.

Anyway, that’s why I was particularly pleased to see a notice from Jonathan Benda about the first edition of the e-journal Taiwan in Comparative Perspectives. There are some interesting-looking articles: I skimmed the intro to one because I couldn’t tell from the title what it was about (it was about architecture, which I would have known if I knew anything about architecture) and skimmed through the one on comparative public memory as a possible reading for late in the semester. There’s a small book review section, but it includes — already in the first issue! — an unhappy response from the author of a reviewed book, which I love.² There’s a thought-provoking, but pie-in-the-sky, article about the EU sovereignty model in relation to the Taiwan sovereignty question which I might well have to give to my China-US grad students. It’s all from a research group at the London School of Economics, and it’s free, so there’s no reason not to take a look at it.

1. though I find the earlier sections quite good, very teachable [↩]
2. it’s the part I read first, in every journal I get: Communications to the Editor! Is this odd? [↩]

With double ten around the corner it seems a good time to discuss the vexed question of who was China’s greatest leader.¹ Via ESNW we learn that at least in Taiwan the answer is Chiang Ching-Kuo.

Almost half of respondents called him Taiwan’s greatest President, 77% said that his positives outweighed his negatives, and a mere 4% said the opposite. For all those who have spent many hours debating if Mao was 60% good and 40% bad or vice versa these are pretty impressive numbers. Double ten would be a great day to raise a glass of vodka in honor of one of the great heroes of democracy in Asia.

1. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday only democratically elected leaders may apply [↩]

Securing grain supplies and providing food security for the peasants was always one of the main duties of the Chinese state, partly because of their deep concern for the well-being of the peasants and partly because they wanted to prevent rebellions. I always teach my students that in a modern market economy secure supplies of staples like grain are less of a concern for the state, and in any case the prices of these things are low enough that most consumers pay little attention.

In China the old level of concern with basic commodity prices stuck around a lot longer. One of my friends spent a winter at a Beijing university in the 80′s, and when she arrived the director of the program assembled the incoming foreign students and said that they had no doubt heard about the poor harvests in the area and were worried about the food supply. She of course had not heard about the poor harvests, and as an American would not have cared, since she was not used to living in a society where her personal food supply was connected to local harvests. The director assured them that things would be fine, because while harvests of almost everything else had been awful, the cabbage harvest had been excellent, and they could be assured of a plentiful supply of cabbage all winter long.

Apparently something similar is happening in Taiwan. Michael Turton reports that wheat prices are going up across Asia, and that Taiwan in particular is feeling the crunch. His sources blame bad harvests, but I suspect that at least part of the problem is that American demand for ethanol is pushing American farmers away from wheat and into corn. I already knew that American SUV’s were destroying the rainforest, but I did not know that they were also depleting the world supply of baozi.