井底之蛙

Opium burning, 1917-1919. Beijing

Duke university has put the entire Sidney Gamble archive on-line. Some of these have been published already (Gamble is pretty well known) but this is the entire archive and it is searchable. Well worth looking at.

Apparently China produces a lot of cement

From the Oil Drum, via Andrew Sullivan, Another in our series of cool teaching graphics.

Teaching about religions is always tricky in part because I and most of my students are heavily influenced by the Christian (especially Protestant) idea that the essence of religion is what you believe. Of course there are things besides orthodoxy (common belief) that religions promote such as common practice or common ritual behavior. The standard way of teaching about religion is to talk a lot about belief, but as this 1870 piece from the Atlantic (via Andrew Sullivan) shows there are other ways to do it.

Those who strive to establish a monopoly of labor are accustomed to sneer at the Chinese as “Pagans.” They urge that citizenship ought not to be granted to them, because their religion is different from ours. Yet those who talk in this way make no objection to receiving Irish emigrants and intrusting them with the elective franchise. But is the Buddhist religion, which prevails in China, much more foreign to our customs and our modes of thinking and believing than the Roman Catholic religion is?

The essay is trying to show that the Chinese in America should not be discriminated against because their religion is not in fact barbaric and they are presumably capable of civilization. Well, at least as capable as the Irish. The author, Lydia Maria Child was not a sinologist and I suspect that much of what she wrote would not have been accepted by scholars even at the time. She comes up with a long list of similarities between Catholicism and Buddhism: pilgrimage, buying your way out of purgatory, cults of the saints, relics, monasticism, a pope/dali lama, art that is mostly “grotesque”, an educated class who scoff at the peasant form of the religion, etc. It is actually sort of tricky to figure out what she is doing here. Part of it may be that as a 19th century Protestant she really is blind to how universal a lot of this is and that what really needs to be explained is not that Catholics and Buddhists go on pilgrimages, but that Protestants do not, given that it is one of the most common forms of religious observance around the world. Child was a great campaigner for abolition and woman’s and Native American rights, so I suppose what she is doing here is trying to make the Chinese seem more like “us” and by focusing on practice rather than belief she actually does a pretty good job of it. I could imagine a number of classes where this would be a good thing to assign.

The New York Times has published three reviews of new Chinese works in translation: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (pen name for Lu Jiamin) and Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. What binds these works together, in particular, is that all three are — at least in part — about the experience of the Cultural Revolution.

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China Beat has a nice post up linking to some teaching resources. Although they list some really good resources that you should all go look at they leave out the the best part of the Asia Society page, which is AsiaFood. Besides being a good on-line cookbook it lets you search based on what ingredients you happen to have on hand and recommends things.

I’ve posted links to interesting recent articles on Tibet on a blog for my teachers’ workshop, ASIA: LEARNING FROM, TEACHING ABOUT.

In Modern China class we will be talking about Communists and their analysis of China’s social classes. What is a poor peasant? I will give them the standard Maoist spiel, but I will also give them this. Other readings that might work for this are solicited.

After my mother took me to live in Jiang Village with her parents, our life was very difficult. My grandfather had lost his sight because he was old and had overworked. He had the white eye disease [cataracts]. My mother was deaf. She had been ill when she was young and couldn’t hear after that. We had about six mu of poor land, enough to feed us for only about half a year. We had no meat and rarely ate vegetables. Every year we ate sorghum porridge twice a day until it ran out, then we ate tree leaves, grasses, roots, and wild vegetables. I did not eat a mantou (steamed wheat bun) until I was seventeen or eighteen years old. I was always hungry. I never went to school. Having nothing to eat, how could I study? To this day I cannot read or write. Later, when I was Communist Party secretary of Houhua Village for thirty years, I did everything by memory. I kept everything in my head.

In Jiang Village my mother helped support us by weaving cotton cloth. Someone would take it to market and buy more raw cotton for her to weave. Our clothes were made from the cloth she wove, as were our cotton shoes, which were dyed with red soil. We never had much to wear. We couldn’t even afford a long overcoat for winter, so I wore a short cotton-filled jacket with a belt around the waist. Even when I was twenty years old my mother and I had to share a single quilt when we slept.

I collected firewood to sell. I remember being beaten when collecting wood near the property of a rich family. They thought I was stealing. Some­times I did steal. Once I stole about 100 jin [1 jin = 1.1 Ibs.] of leaves from pear trees. We boiled them and ate them for quite a long time. When I was sixteen or seventeen I collected manure for fertilizer. One day when two of us were collecting manure, we were accused of stealing and told to eat it. The other person did, but I didn’t because my grandfather came in time.

I sometimes worked as a short-term laborer for the more prosperous households in the village. I was used only for a few days at harvest time to cut corn and sorghum. I received no pay but was given my food for the day. I remember well that when I was about eighteen I was working for a rich peasant and was given five steamed wheat buns at noon and four more in the evening. They were the best thing I had ever eaten, and that was the first time I had ever had enough to eat. The next day there was no work, and I was hungry again.

from  Seybolt, Peter J. Throwing the Emperor from His Horse: Portrait of a Village Leader in China, 1923-1995. Westview Press, 1996.

Book order forms for the Fall are on my desk again, and again I am going to ask for any advice people might feel like sending my way. The two Asia courses I am teaching are Modern Japan and Introduction to Asian Studies.

Introduction to Asian Studies is the tricky one. It is supposed to introduce our Asian Studies majors and minors to the study of Asia. I learned from my evaluations last time that some of them expect the class to cover all the societies of Asia from all possible disciplinary perspectives. I am a bit more modest in my goals and usually build the class around four or five books and a couple of movies that deal with several different parts of Asia from various disciplines.

The theme for this time will be “Protest and Dissent in Asia”  and I was thinking of using

-Multatuli Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company Indonesia, colonialism, and it’s a novel!

-Apter and Sawa Against the State:Politics and Social Protest in Japan Japan and Political Science. Has anyone used this?

-Nir Rosen In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq Iraq (obviously) and journalism. I like making them read something by a journalist, since they read a lot of journalism stuff anyway and should learn how to work with it. This title jumped out at me, but It has not arrived yet and I have not yet read it. Any other suggestions?

John W. Dardess Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and its Repression 1620-1627  China and history. I have my doubts about this. I liked it, but will it work for students? I like making them realize that the world existed before 1800, but this book may not work. There must be some biography or whatever of some pre-modern dissident that is out in paperback. Maybe do Keene’s Frog in a Well  and dump Apter and do something Poly-Sci ish on China, like Lee’s Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt?(really more Anthro than poly-sci, actually)

Basically, I am looking for good books that will stick with students. Any recommendations are most welcome.

For the Modern Japan class I am going to use a textbook and probably

-Walthall The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration
The one stop shop for all your Late Tokugawa society, Meiji politics Gender and Economics stuff.

-Kawabata The Scarlet Gang of Asukusa looks very good, although I have not used it before. Has anyone tried this?

-Then something postwar. But what? I did Embracing Defeat last time and it worked o.k., although I think it was a bit too long.

Kate Merkel-Hess at China Beat had an intriguing list last month, Five Chinese Historical Events That Don’t Get Much Attention, (2/ 11/08) which was in turn inspired by Jeremiah Jenne’s piece at Jottings From the Granite Studio about the most important Chinese historical figure most people have never heard of.

That got me to thinking – why discriminate against an event just because it didn’t happen? Very un-Daoist. So to kick things off, here are five things that didn’t happen. We don’t mean alleged “failure” to follow European models, such as the once common “failure to modernize,” but turns not taken. You’ll see that they fall into different ontological categories, since there is a lot of wiggle room when it comes to things that don’t exist.

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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 [↩]