井底之蛙

I recently discovered Beijing Time Machine, run  by Jared Hall. His recent piece Time over Place: Naming Historical Events in Chinese (ironically, it is not dated), is a striking and useful observation:

In English, we generally recall important turning points in terms of where they unfolded. Simple place names conjure up entire historical epochs. “Pearl Harbor” marks the American entrance into the Second World War and the global struggle against fascism. “Bandung,” the conference in of newly independent African and Asian nations that pledged to stand together in 1955 against imperialism and Cold War division. And then, of course, there is “Tian’anmen.” It is doubtful that mention of the square here in China would, by itself, raise any eyebrows. But try “6-4″ (六四) and you are can expect quite a different reaction.

There is also a useful chart of name years in the sixty year cycle, which you can download to put on your desk calendar or refrigerator door.

I got an e-mail from Online Colleges. It seems to be a semi-scam site that offers to connect you to on-line colleges without actually, from what I can tell, providing any real service. Needless to say, it would probably help them if they could give the site some veneer of academic content, and thus they have a list of 101 lectures on China. The page just links to lectures (academic and popular) already available on I-tunes and elsewhere, but some of them look pretty interesting. So if you are looking for something to listen too this is a good place to start.

http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2010/10/13/101-lectures-to-learn-all-about-china/

A major problem nowadays is to somehow find that newly published article in a journal you don’t subscribe to – I miss enough articles in the journals I do subscribe to.

The first resort is the Bibliography of Asian Studies Online, only available by subscription (individuals can subscribe but it’s mostly libraries). BAS categorizes hundreds of thousands of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes going back to 1971. The search makes is easy to find an article if you know what you are looking for.  Good enough.

But it’s harder to come across what you weren’t looking for. The most fun way of dealing with the problem is simple: if you have access to a good library’s journal room, stroll up and down the aisles browsing like a deer for acorns. This is good for at least an afternoon and it gets you out of your office but it’s far from systematic and many of us don’t have that access.

So I have been happy in a major way that H-DIPLO has stepped in to organize Journal Watch: H-Diplo Journal & Periodical Review.

The self-description is “H-Diplo Journal Watch monitors leading scholarly journals for articles of particular interest to scholars of diplomacy, foreign relations, and international history, which are listed below by journal title.” Each quarter they post a  .pdf file with Tables of Contents for every journal you ever heard of in those fields, or at least the ones in English.  You can either browse or search for your words. Coverage begins with the year 2007.

Putting this together can’t be much fun, so kudos goes to our new heroes, Erin Black, editor for journal titles from A-I, and Lubna Qureshi, editor for journal titles from J-Z.

Journal Watch doesn’t solve the problem – there’s just too much coming out and there’s no way to search by key words or topic. But every competent project like this is a big help, and you are sure to find acorns which you would have missed.

I didn’t get to any China-specific panels at the AAS, but the good folks at China Beat have a few panel summaries worth taking a look at. You can find some more at Twitter, but not much. Aside from the primitive facilities — it was $600 to get internet service for a panel presentation, we were told; it was $13/day for hotel room internet, and there wasn’t any wireless in the hotel or convention center — we just don’t have a critical mass of tweeting Asianists yet. Just a couple that I’ve found. I did have a good time meeting Javier Cha, though, the first time I’ve met with someone I met on Twitter!

Historical sources of various kinds are making it online all the time. I recently came across a digital collection of Chinese newspapers from Canada available at the Multicultural Canada website.

Chinese Canadian Community News 加華僑報 (1970s-80s)
Chinese Express 快報 (1970s-80s)
Chinese Times 大漢公報 (1910s-1990s)
Hung Chung She Po 洪鐘時報 (1950s)
Ottawa Chinese Community Newsletter 加京華報 (1970s-80s)

There is also some issues of a Korean newspaper:

Minchung Sinmun

We can read, for example, the report of opening of hostilities in July 1937 on the day after the firing began in the July 8th issue, where the news (中日戰爭爆發) reached page 2. Also of concern that day, was the treatment of Chinese within Japan, which also gets reported on.

Though some years and months are listed, I had trouble finding issues in many of them. It would be nice if they had a list of available issues at the home page for each newspaper. The pages, when opened, are embedded into the site, but are simple JPG files which can be made to open in a new window using contextual menus.

Also, via their collection of links, I noticed there are some interesting materials related to the Chinese in Canada on this site:

Historical Chinese Language Materials in British Columbia: An Electronic Inventory

The site includes access to historical photographs, lists of organizations, and links to other Canadian sites containing historical materials.

Although the revival of Confucius in China naturally tends to emphasize a timeless vision of an unchanging Sage and set of teachings, the 儒家 have actually changed a lot over time. Thomas Wilson has put up a nice site that gives a clear introduction to the development of the Confucian cult and is well worth looking at, especially for the details on the development of the cannon. Plus you can find out that among his titles he was declared “Dark Sage and Exalted King of Culture” in 1008. Assuming  Dark Sage is 玄聖that is a really cool title and gives us all something to aim for.

China Gateway has some pictures, with translation, from The Dianshizhai Pictorial the famous late 19th century Shanghai illustrated paper. I say famous because it is rapidly becoming one of the most reproduced and re-packaged parts of Chinese culture. WorldCat shows 69 hits for the keywords 點石齋畫報 which includes full editions, selections (stories about Suzhou or whatever) translations into baihua, and some of the scholarly studies. I assume there is a lot more about it that you could dig up with other keywords.  Googleing yields lots of pictures like the above and even more commentary. It is a very Web-friendly sort of souce, since it is in short chunks, has pictures and a bit of text and above all is out of copyright.  In time the public image of the Late Qing may come to be tied as specifically to this bit of art as the T’ang is to poets or the European middle ages are to the Arthur stories.

Via China Beat

I just read on H-Asia that Harvard has announced last week that, in cooperation with the National Library of China, it will be scanning its 51,500 volumes of Chinese rare books. Early next year it will begin with its collection of Song to Ming dynasty works, and then move on to its collection of Qing dynasty works in 2013.

They also noted, importantly, that after digitization they will continue to allow scholars access to the works.

Read more about the announcement here.

BibliOddyssey has a nice post up with cool pictures from the World Digital Library. The site has images from all over the world, and a really neat interface.

This is an image from a Qing dynasty edition of the Shanhaijing. They have a good bit of Chinese stuff, including a zoom-able 1900 map of Beijing for those interested in the Boxers. Also a lot of stuff for those interested in the rest of East Asia.

Speechwars.com lets you see how many times American presidents have used various words in their State of the Union addresses. This is not a perfect representation of American interests, since some Presidents are more prolix than others and just from my own perusal of the site the SOTU seems to be getting more vague over the years. Still China turns up a lot (353 times) and it is sort of interesting to look at why. The handful of early references use ‘China’ to mean the ends of the earth or are brief mentions about foreign relations. Grant mentions China a lot in 1870 and 71, usually coupled with Japan (only 222 total mentions! hah!) and the “nations to our South” as the solution to American economic problems. China Market stuff seems to take precedence in the late 19th Century, although the theme of Chinese as barbarians seems common as well.¹ The biggest spike of interest comes from 1900 to about 1912, when China got more individual mentions than it would in the 1940′s as our wartime ally or than it gets today as the sugar daddy who buys all our paper.

The big jump came in 1900, when McKinley gave a long recounting of the Boxer uprising, which was of course America’s first major act of cooperative imperialism, just as the Spanish-American war² was the first³ unilateral act. I got the impression he was trying to justify his “soft” policy on indemnities to an American public who were going to have to learn that there with other ways of dealing with non-whites besides killing 90% of them and putting the other 10% on reservations.

Teddy Roosevelt seems quite the Friend of China. In 1905 he promised to keep out Chinese laborers but insisted that “we must treat the Chinese student, traveler, and business man in a spirit of the broadest justice and courtesy if we expect similar treatment to be accorded to our own people of similar rank who go to China.” (What, gunboats are not enough?) In 1908 Roosevelt uses China as an example of the perils of deforestation, implicitly saying that China was part of the human community and that we could learn lessons (even cautionary ones) from them.

Fortunately Taft comes along right after that to get us back on the dollar diplomacy track. He spends a lot of words in 1910 assuring us that American capital is right there building railways and exploiting China along with the best of them. He gives the fall of the Qing a brief notice in 1912, but only to assure us that the loans will keep on coming.

After Taft China flatlines for a good decade, however. Not much chance of making a buck in warlord China, and it was not a good example of how American policy was civilizing the globe. So 1900-1912 looks like a time when America and China were both coming out into an international world at the same time.

Via Fallows

1. I just sampled the speeches rather than reading them all line by line [↩]
2. Cuba got a spike of mentions just before 1900 [↩]
3. Yes, not the first. It’s a blog post [↩]