From Gawker a set of military recruitment ads from around the world. Representing East Asia we have Taiwanese who gain skills while defending 20 million people from an unknown enemy, a Singaporean battleship that transforms into a giant robot, and an ad for the Japanese Navy that is quite remarkable.

(Japanese ad intercut with an American one)

Lots of American military recruitment ads (which turn up a lot on the type of shows my 15-year old son watches) emphasize how joining up connects you to a glorious history, not just the few, the proud, etc. but pictures of the G.I.s who defended freedom by beating Hitler. They tend to avoid pictures defenders of freedom in blue uniforms shooting defenders of slavery in gray, since that brings up some history that they don’t want brought up.

The British ad is maybe the best and most historical. The ad shows as screaming armed black guy (ohh a native) who is calmed by the sheer stiff upper lip  and steely eyes of a British officer. Remember when Britain was an Empire? Well that was before your time, but IF you could be a real British officer that would be something. Beats sitting around Oldham getting pissed, anyway.

In East Asia military history is a very fraught subject. The PLA has killed lots of people, but many of them were Chinese. Even stirring up anti-Japanese feelings (or even bringing up the Revolution) may not be a good idea.

The Japanese Navy of course also has a glorious history, if one assumes that for a Navy a glorious history means sending lots of foreigners to watery graves. Needless to say they don’t want to emphasize that. Maybe a dance routine is best.

Here is a PRC version. Comparing ads you might think Taiwan and Chinese Beijing were the same country.

Via Tapped

A while back I was wondering why people in classical Chinese texts seemed to cry so much. Was being able to shed tears on demand something that people were supposed to be able to do? It turns out that Qian Zhongshu had already written about tears and their role in partings, which were an important ritual in elite society. Qian at least seem to support the idea of a gradual transition towards a more “”masculineist” view that tears are just for women. But really his piece is worth reading just for itself.

TEARS AT PARTINGS

That is why people about to part clasp each other’s arms affectionately, and urge the other to take care after they separate. When we parted, your display of love was like that of Zou Wen and Ji Jie, so that your eyelashes were soaked with tears. Yet I merely clasped my hands in a gesture and turned away, ashamed to act like a woman.

—Wang Sengru (465-522),
Letter to He Jiong

The reference here to HeJiong’s weeping is reminiscent of several lines in “Rhapsody on Partings,” byJiang Yan (444-505): “He pushes aside the jade-fretted lute, tears wet the carriage bars,” “When it is time to let go hands, they choke back tears,” “They weep as they say good-bye,” “Kin and companion are bathed in tears.”1

In his essay “On Wailing as a Ritual” Yu Zhengxie (1775-1840) examines the ritual use of “crying facilitators” in ancient funerals, and he observes, “According to the ritual prescriptions, one did not necessarily have to shed tears when crying.”2 I would venture to add that crying was a propriety required not only at funerals. It was also required at partings among the living, although as such it may not have been as universally observed or as ancient as crying at funerals. Furthermore, if a person’s crying at a parting did not include the shedding of tears, he was likely to be faulted for violating propriety. On this point the standards seem to
have been even stricter than those for crying at funerals.

The expectation that one must cry at partings seems to have become widespread only in Jin times (265-420). The narrative of an event that took place shortly earlier is revealing in this regard:

Once when the king of Wei (Cao Cao, 155-220) set off on a campaign, his two sons, the crown prince and Zhi, the lord of Linzi, saw him off at the side of the road. Zhi proclaimed the virtue and merit of the mission with words that were elegant and decorous. Everyone fixed their eyes upon him, and the king himself was pleased with him. The crown prince, by contrast, had a sorrowful expression and seemed not to know what to do. Wu Zhi whispered in his ear, “The king is about to depart. It is permissible to shed tears.” When he said his farewell, the crown prince wept as he bowed. The king and his attendants sighed audibly, so moved were they by this display. Later, everyone said that the lord of Linzi’s speech was excessively florid, while the genuine affection in his heart was insufficient.3

From this we may infer that at the end of the Han dynasty it was not yet customary to cry at partings. That is why Wu Zhi’s clever ploy was effective and caused the crown prince to outshine his younger brother. The Old Tang Dynasty History says, “When Emperor Tai (r. 62,7-649) decided to lead an attack upon the Korean kingdom of Koguryo, he ordered the crown prince to stay behind and guard Dingzhou, Once a date had been set for the emperor’s departure from Dingzhou, the crown prince cried sorrowfully for several days.”4 Was this crown prince also heeding Wu Zhi’s advice of long before?

The failure to produce tears with one’s crying has been variously criticized, explained, or even excused. Forest of Sayings (fourth c.) records the following: “A man went to take leave of Master Xie. Xie shed tears but the other man showed no sign of emotion. Once he left, the attendants said, ‘That guest only showed
gloomy clouds.’” Xie commented, ‘It was even less than “gloomy clouds.” It was “dry thunder.”‘ “5 “Gloomy clouds” is like what is recorded about Empress Lu in Records of the Grand Historian and The Han Dynasty History: “The empress cried but did not weep.”6 Yan Shigu explains in his commentary that “weep” means to produce tears.7 “Dry thunder” is like one of the “three kinds of crying” described in Chapter 25 of The Water Margin’. “To make noise without producing tears is called ‘howling’… ‘dry howling’” and what Monkey says in Chapter 39 of Journey to the West: “There are several types of crying. If the  mouth makes noise but the eyes remain dry, that is called ‘howling.’”8

Family Instructions of the Yan Clan (sixth c.) says:

Separations occur frequently, whereas reunions are difficult to bring about. That is why the ancients assigned great importance to partings. At farewell banquets in the South, one weeps when speaking of the imminent departure. There was, for example, the case of a prince who was the younger cousin of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty. When the prince was leaving to take charge of Dong Prefecture, he bid farewell to the emperor. The emperor … wept tears that covered his face, but the prince only showed “gloomy clouds”
and then left, blushing with embarrassment. For this reason he was punished (by winds that would not let his boat depart).. .. Northern customs, by contrast, pay no regard to this convention. Standing at a crossroads, friends say good-bye with a merry laugh.

There are, however, also people who, by nature, are not given to shedding tears. Their heart may be breaking but their eyes remain perfectly clear. This type of person should not be blamed for failing to weep at a departure.9

A person who sheds no tears though the heart is afflicted is said to have “a soft heart and stiff eyes.” This is the terminology used in Zhu Shuzhen’s (fl..1095-1131) couplet, “Although a woman’s eyes are said to be soft, / Tears do not flow forth for no reason” and in the anonymous early Ming song, “I’ve always had stiff eyes, / Which don’t show sadness before lovely scenery.”10 Classified Sayings (1136) quotes an account of Liu Xiaochuo’s farewell to Wang Yuanjing, when Yuanjing was departing on an official mission: “Xiaochuo wept, but Yuanjing had no tears. He apologized for this, saying, ‘Please don’t hold it against me. After we separate, tears will stream down my face.’”11 He means that although at the moment he has no tears, later he is bound to weep, fulfilling the required response. When Wang Seng-u parted from He Jiong, as we have seen earlier, Jiong wept but Sengru had “stiff eyes” and thus was in violation of the Southern custom. Moreover, unlike Wang Yuanjing, Sengru neglected even to excuse himself by promising to cry subsequently. That is why he subsequently sought to justify his conduct in a letter.

Despite the social convention of crying at partings described above, there was also a tradition of viewing tears shed by men as being “womanly” or even disingenuous. Wang Sengru’s letter says, as we have seen, “your display of love was like that of Zou Wen and Ji Jie…. Yet I merely clasped my hands in a gesture and
turned away, ashamed to act like a woman.” The allusion is to The Kong Family Masters (third c. B.C.):12

Zigao traveled to Zhao, where among the retainers of the Lord of Pingyuan there were Zou Wen and Ji Jie, who befriended Zigao. When it was time for Zigao to return to Lu,… as he took his leave. Wen and Jie had tears all over their cheeks, but Zigao merely clasped his hands in a gesture…. Later, Zigao said, “At first I thought that these two were true men of stature. Today I see that they are just women.” … His attendant asked, “Is there no good to be found in weeping?” Zigao replied, “Weeping has two uses. Men of great treachery use it to persuade others of their sincerity. Women and cowards use it to make a show of their
affection.”

Similarly, A New Account of Tales of the World says, “When Zhou Shuzhi was appointed prefect of Jingling, his older brothers, Zhou Hou and Zhongzhi, went tobid him farewell. Zhou Shuzhi cried and wept without stopping. Zhongzhi said indisgust, ‘This man acts for all the world like a woman. When he parts from some-body, he does nothing but yammer and blubber.’ Whereupon he removed himselfand left.”14 Zhou Shuzhi knew that weeping was a propriety required at partings,but he did not realize that the same propriety, carried to extremes, could provokedisgust and enmity rather than affection. (Luo Yin’s [833-909] poem, “Tears,” says,”Ever since the realm of Lu disappeared / It has either been treacherous men orwomen [who shed tears]” clearly also drawing upon The Kong Family Masters pas-sage.15 Li Yu’s [937-978] farewell to his younger brother, the prince ofDeng, says”Sorrowful tears and sweet words are the habitual manner of women and girls, I willhave none of it.”16 The use of such language in a farewell composition is likewise a veiled allusion to The Kong Family Masters.)

Crying and weeping were frequently used as a shortcut up the mountain of officialdom, which is one reason they were so often viewed with suspicion. The earliest record of this occurs in the biography of Wang Mang in The Han Dynasty History. In the autumn of the fourth year of the Dihuang period (A.D. 23), Mang
led his assembled ministers to the southern suburb to lift their eyes toward Heaven and cry aloud in an effort to suppress the national calamity. “Students and commoners gathered in the morning and cried out until the evening…. Those who showed extreme grief and those who could recite his Announcement to Heaven from memory were promoted as court attendants. Over five thousand men earned appointment this way.”17 The Old Tan^Dynasty History says, “Erudite Wei Chifen requested that Li Jifu be given the posthumous epithet ‘Respectful of Regulations.’ Zhang Zhongfang objected and criticized Jifu’s character, saying, ‘Fawning tears hung upon his eyelids and flowed our at every convenience. Clever words served him like the reed mouthpiece of a musical instrument, which sings out soothingly whenever blown upon.’”18

Chen Jiru (1558-1639) comments, “Whenever I read this, I smile, thinking it should be posted on-the walls of pleasure quarters everywhere as a warning.”19 He is equating “treacherous men” with “women,” saying that their behavior in this respect is interchangeable: the treacherous man’s tears are like those of the courtesan, and the courtesan’s tears are themselves a form of treachery. Yuan Mei’s Remarks on Poetry quotes lines thatJiang Sunfu addressed to a courtesan, “I ask that you not wipe away those lovesick tears, / Save them to send off another man tomorrow morning.”20 This shows the reality of “crying at the time of parting” in the pleasure quarters!

The association of tears with opportunistic men who are anxious to display their “loyalty,” and likened to insincere women eager to prove their “love,” continues in later periods. Shen Defu (1578-1612) observes:

Shamelessness among men of learning has never been more pronounced than during the Chenghua period (1465-1487). Since the Jiajing period (1522.-1566), it has manifested itself again. Wang Hong knocked his head on the floor and wept as he pleaded with Grand Secretary Zhang Fujing; Zhao Wenhua bowed a hundred times as he wept and beseeched Grand Secretary Yan Song; and Chen Sanmo knelt and wept on and on before Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng, Each of these men regained favor and salary because of a few streaks of glistening tears. The ancients said, “Women sell love by weeping, and vile men peddle treacherous schemes by weeping.” It is really so!

(The reference here to “the ancients” is also to the passage in The Kong Family Masters.) Wang Shizhen (1634-1711) says:

When Dong Na was leaving his post as censor to become governor-general of Zhejiang and jiangxi, one of his former colleagues in the Censorate went to say farewell and, sitting down close beside him, burst out crying and would not stop. Dong was very moved by this display and everyone present considered it most extraordinary. When he was done, the man went directly to visit Yu Guozhu, the minister from Daye, and as soon as he entered the room and bowed, he burst out laughing. Startled, Yu Guozhu asked him why he
laughed. The man replied, “Dong is gone. The nail has been extracted from my eye!

This may serve as a gloss upon Chen Jiru’s remark about the warning that should.
be posted on the walls of pleasure quarters.

In fact, the usefulness of “selling tears” is no less than that of the courtesan’s ploy of “selling smiles.” Moreover, the sheer volume of the “bribes by tears” and “proprieties of tears” that have been offered by men through the ages may exceed that of the “three pools of tears” mentioned by Tang Chuanying (1620-1644) as well as the celebrated “debt of tears” that must be repaid by Lin Daiyu in Tbe Story of the Stone.24 (As for the latter, it may be noted that such notions as the “repayment of tears” and the “owing of tears” mentioned in Chapters 1 and 5 of the novel may be traced to Meng Jiao’s [751-814] lines, “You owe me ten years of love/I must have a debt to you of a thousand streams of tears,” in a poem lamenting the death of his son, and Liu Yong’s [mid eleventh c.] lines, “You have tied my heart to you for a lifetime /1 must owe you a thousand streams of tears.” These are the first occurrences in literary works of the idea of a debt of tears.)23

Notes (not copyedited)

SOURCE: Guanzhui Uan 4:1435-38; cf. the addendum, ibid., 5:251-252.
EPIGRAPH; Wang Sengru, “Yu HeJiong shu,” Qyan Liang wen 5l.4a.

1. Jiang Yan, “Hen fu,” Wen xuan i6.27b, 28a, 28b, and 2gb; trans. Burton Watson,
Chinese Rhyme Prose, pp. 97-99, modified.

2. Yu Zhengxie, “Ku wei liyi shuo,” Gwisi leigao 13.504-505. Qian’s quotation is actu-
ally a paraphrase.

3. Pei Songzhi’s commentary on Sanyo zbi 21.609, quoting Shi yu.

4. JIM Tangs(iM4A.65-66.

5. Yiwen leiju 29.512.

6. Shi ji9.388andHansfow97A.3938.

7. Yan Shigu commentary on Han sbtt 97A.3939.

8. Shi Nai’an, Shuihu quanzfcuan 25,400; and Wu Cheng’en, Xiyouji 39.535.

9. Yan Zhitui, Yanshi jiaxun jijie 6,91; cf, trans. by Ssu-yii Teng, family Instructions for
the Yen Clan, p. 31.

^  10. Zhu Shuzhen, “Qiuri shuhuai,” Zhu Shuzhen ji 6.103; and “Xiaoyao Ie,” quoted in Li
Kaixian, Ci nue, p. 938.

11. Zeng Zao, Lei shuo 53.2a.

12. Qian notes parenthetically that the quotation of Wang Sengru’s letter in Yiwen leiju

26.481 erroneously gives “Guo Li” for “Zou andJi” (my “Zou Wen andJiJie”), an error he
attributes to a copyist who did not recognize the KongFamily Masters.

13. Kongcongzi, “Rufu,” 8.13.86-87.

14. Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu, “Fangzheng,” 5.26.308 (following Liu’s text); trans. Rich-
ard B. Mather, A New Account of Tales of tile World, p. 164, modified.

15. Lo Yin, “Lei,” Qyan Tangshi 658.7561.

16. Li Yu (Houzhu), “Song Deng wang ershiliu di mu Xuancheng xu,” Qyan Tang wen
l28.l6b.

17. Han shu 990.4188.

18. Jro Tangshu 171.4443.

19. ChenJiru, Taiping qinghua 2.5b.

20. Jiang Sunfu, “Zeng zhi,” quoted in Yuan Mei, Suiyuan shihua 1.22.

21. Reading “Chenghua” instead of “Chengzheng” (in both Shen’s text and Qian’s
quotation), which must be a mistake. Cf. a similar reference to the Chenghua period earlier
in Shen’s work: Shen Defu, Wanliyehuo bian 21.541.

22. Shen Defu, ibid., 21.549. Qian abbreviates and paraphrases the original,

23. Wang Shizhen, Gufuyu ting zaiu 1.11, following Wang’s text.

24. For Tang Chuanying, see Xianyu bihua, p. 3a-b. For Lin Daiyu, see the citations to
Honglou meng below.

25. MengJiao, “Diao youzi,” Qyan Tang shi 381.4273; and Liu Yong, “Yi dying,” Qyan
Song ci 1:49. Cf. Cao Xueqin, Honglou meng 1.5 and 5.78.

Tears and sincerity

Via CDT a report on gated communities for the poor outside Beijing. In theory the purpose is to protect residents from crime, but of course the main goal is to keep migrant workers under control.

That road into Shoubaozhuang is guarded 24 hours a day by two uniformed guards and partially barred by an accordion gate that closes tight at 11 p.m. each night. Until 6 a.m. the next day, the residents are sealed in. Only those with passes are allowed to come and go, their movements recorded by a video camera stationed over the entrance.

Gated communities for the rich are of course nothing new in China. Dividing an entire city into walled wards to keep the population under control is also not new. Charles Benn describes the system in the Tang.¹

The function of ward walls was to provide internal security by preventing the movement of people. The law clearly asserted the principle. Ninety blows with a thick rod was the punishment for climbing over ward walls. Each of a ward’s roads terminated in gates that a headman, who was in charge of affairs within the ward, barred at dusk. As the sun went down in Changan, a tattoo of 400 beats on a drum signaled the closing of palace gates and a second, of 600 beats, the closing of ward and city gates. The length of the tattoos gave people ample time to return to their dwellings before the ward gates closed. In the predawn hours drummers beat another tattoo of 3,000 beats that was the signal for opening the gates. Each of the avenues also had drums that sounded at curfew. The law forbade citizens to travel on the main thoroughfares of the cities outside the wards during curfew, but it did not restrict their nocturnal movements within the wards. The statute, however, permitted public commissioners bearing official documents, as well as marriage processions, to use the avenues and streets after curfew. In both cases they had to obtain a permit from the county government first. It also allowed private citizens who needed to find a doctor or procure medicine for the treatment of the ill to travel, as well as those who needed to leave their ward to announce a death. However, they had to have a certificate issued by the ward headman. Anyone else found wandering outside the wards during the night by the Gold Bird Guard was subject to twenty blows of the thin rod. In 808, however, the throne had a eunuch who got drunk and violated the curfew beaten to death. The emperor also demoted the officer in charge of the Gold Bird Guard and banished him from the capital.

Sadly for the Tang rulers weakening government power after the An Lushan rebellion and then the greater commercialization and fluidity of society made it impossible to keep up the system. In the Song and after the system of gated wards could not be re-imposed. The current Chinese government, however, is at least making an effort at restoring the glory of the Tang.

1. the system of urban wards goes back at least to the Han.

Over at the invaluable Danwei,  Julian Smisek’s “Hu Shi, missionaries, and women’s rights” (July 15, 2010) does a valuable service in translating Hu’s 1930 essay, “Congratulations to the YWCA,”  which pays tribute to Christian missionaries for helping Chinese women.

Hu, a Columbia University PhD, won a poll in the early 1920s as the most admired “returned student” in China. But his surprising words of praise for the YWCA need to be balanced against his views on Christianity’s future in China. He elsewhere disdained the run of Christian missionaries as uneducated and narrow. They came to China because they could live well for little money, he said, and mission boards were far less careful in selecting China missionaries than Standard Oil was in selecting China salesmen and executives.

Hu’s “China and Christianity” was the lead piece in the July 1927 issue of the North American journal, The Forum. That year saw Chiang Kai-shek purge the Communists and Mao Zedong take to the countryside, setting off a generation of civil war, but the editor introduces Hu as “the leader of an intellectual movement that is permeating the youth of China and is interested chiefly in the things of the mind.” Like the “ancient sages of the East,” Hu “stands outside the current political conflict.”

Here’s the editorial in its entirety:

The future of Christianity in China is a question which should be considered apart from the question of the past services rendered to China by the Christian missionaries. The part played by the missionaries in the modernization of China will long be remembered by the Chinese, even though no Christian church may be left there. They were the pioneers of the new China. They helped the Chinese to fight for the suppression of opium which the pirate-traders brought to us. They agitated against footbinding, which eight centuries of esoteric philosophizing in native China failed to recognize as an inhuman institution. And they brought to us the first rudiments of European science. The early Jesuits gave us the pre-Newtonian astronomy, and the later Protestant missionaries introduced modern hospitals and schools. They taught us to know that there was a new world and a new civilization behind the pirate-traders and gunboats.

Many of the Protestant missionaries worked hard to awaken China and bring about a modern nation. China is now awakened and determined to modernize herself. There is not the slightest doubt that a new and modem China is emerging out of chaos. But this new China does not seem to promise much bright future to the propagation of the Christian faith. On the contrary, Christianity is facing opposition everywhere. The dream of a “Christian occupation of China” seems to be fast vanishing, – probably forever. And the explanation is not far to seek.

It is true that there is much cheap argument in the narrow nationalistic attack which sees in the Christian missionary an agent of imperialist aggression. But we must realize that it is nationalism, – the self-consciousness of a nation with no mean cultural past,– that once killed Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Manicheism in China. It is the same nationalism which four times persecuted Buddhism and finally killed it after over a thousand years of complete Buddhistic conquest of China. And it is the same national consciousness which is now resisting the essentially alien religion of Christianity.

And more formidable than nationalism, there is the rise of rationalism. We must not forget that Chinese philosophy began two thousand five hundred years ago with Lao Tse who taught a naturalistic conception of the universe end a Confucius who was frankly an agnostic. This rationalistic and humanistic tradition has always played the part of a liberator in every age when the nation seemed to be under the influence of a superstitious or fanatic religion. This cultural background of indigenous China is now revived with the new reinforcement of the methods and conclusions of modern science and becomes a truly formidable safeguard of the intellectual class against the imposition of any religious system whose fundamental dogmas, despite all efforts of its apologists, do not always stand the test of reason and science.

And after all, Christianity itself is fighting its last battle, even in the so-called Christendoms. To us born heathens, it is a strange sight indeed to see Billy Sunday and Aimée McPherson hailed and patronized in an age whose acknowledge prophets are Darwin and Pasteur. The religion of Elmer Gantry and Sharon Falconer must sooner or later make all thinking people feel ashamed to call themselves “Christians”. And then they will realize that Young China was not far wrong in offering some opposition to a religion which in its glorious days fought religious wars and persecuted science, and which, in the broad daylight of the twentieth century prayed for the victory of the belligerent nations in the World War and is still persecuting the teaching of science in certain quarters of Christendom.

It’s impressive both that The Forum published a critical piece from an intellectual in China and that Hu kept up with the latest stateside scandals and the novels of Sinclair Lewis. At a time when anti-imperialist tempers ran high, Hu coolly uses cosmopolitan liberal standards which stand above particular nations. His criteria apply to China and the US as well. But perhaps Hu should have known better than to think that rationality could combine with nationalism to save 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 had an old instructor of Chinese language many years ago who took every opportunity to pick fun at the evil Reds on the mainland. I think he fled China in 1949 and never got over it. He loved to pick on their character simplification, saying things like, “Only the Communists would take the heart out of love.” (愛 -> 爱) Or, referring to the wings represented in the character 習 for “to learn; study” – and how this nicely gave us the image of taking flight, he would say, “Ask the Communists how you can fly with only one wing!” (習 -> 习)

I always thought his complaints were humorous but unfair, simplification will always result in such changes, and many (most?) were adopted from existing simplifications used widely in handwriting. The KMT dabbled with simplification as well, even if it never worked out. There are many fans of the simplification process and while I personally find simplified characters downright ugly to look at by comparison, I can’t really explain how I came to this aesthetic conclusion. Perhaps the old teacher brain-washed me, or the fewer simplifications of Japanese, which I studied first, made their mark?

Some simplifications already in circulation before the first round of the Chinese government mandated simplification in the mid 1950s, however, didn’t make the cut.

One that I have come across in the past couple of years and seen used in a wide range of hand written (or etched) documents of the Communist party is the simplification of the character for “Han” (漢) as in the Han people or more generally, Chinese, into the character 汗, which normally means “sweat” instead of the character which was ultimately chosen as the standard for simplified Chinese, 汉.

At one point I thought this might only be the case in documents which were “etched” in the age of pre-photocopy copies, where making curved lines is more difficult, but I have seen the same document use two of the three variations, 漢, 汗, and 汉.

I notice this more often than one might in my documents from the 1930s and 1940s since I study the punishment of traitors, or hanjian (漢奸). This word often appears in my documents as 汗奸. When I first saw it, I did a double take, wondering what horrible sins had been committed by the “sweaty traitors.”

Find the sweaty traitors in examples below the fold all taken from Public Security Bureau or more specifically “treason elimination” reports from 1939-1947 (some have a sweaty traitor, some have both regular and sweaty traitors, and one has the more common simplification):

Anyone else have favorite simplifications that didn’t make it, or which made the cut but ought not have been chosen?

Columbia University Press is publishing a complete translation of the Huainanzi, a Han-dynasty compendium of philosophy and statecraft which has been of great interest to scholars for many years but is only now receiving a full English translation

We are lucky enough to have John Major, one of the translators here for a guest post on the process of translation and also to answer a few questions.

In March of this year Columbia University Press published The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China, a translation of a classic work of early Chinese philosophy written under the general editorship of Liu An, King of Huainan, and presented to the Han imperial throne in 139 BCE. My colleagues and I in the translation team hope and expect that this first-ever translation of The Huainanzi into English will make an important contribution to the study of Chinese intellectual history by opening a fascinating window into currents of thought in the early Han dynasty.

The process of translating this massive and challenging work may be of interest.

In about 1994 I mentioned to my friend Hal Roth (Harold D. Roth, Brown University) that I was thinking of doing a full Huainanzi translation, and he replied that he was thinking of doing the same. So we decided to join forces; that’s how the project got started. Both of us had already devoted large amounts of our professional attention to the Huainanzi. We believed that it was under-appreciated in the field of early China studies; everyone in the field knew of Liu An’s great work and perhaps consulted it for comparative purposes when working on other texts, but few people at that time had made The Huainanzi the focus of their research. It was the last really major work of Chinese philosophy from the early imperial period that still lacked a complete English translation. (A Paris-based group beat us to the distinction of publishing the first Western-language translation; their French translation was published in 2002.)

We landed a Chiang Ching-kuo fellowship to begin the work in 1996-98. Jay Sailey, an independent scholar who also had a longstanding interest in The Huainanzi was initially part of the project but later dropped out; a few years into the project two additional participants came on board. The final team consisted of John Major, Sarah Queen (Connecticut College), Andrew Meyer (Brooklyn College) and Hal Roth. Michael Puett (Harvard) participated in the translation of chapter 13, and Judson Murray (Wright State U.) participated in the translation of chapter 21. But the core team was the four of us.

The project took so long — about fifteen years — partly because the text is quite large (the published translation runs to just over 1000 pages) and also quite difficult (it is in standard Classical Chinese but there are many textual issues to deal with and some of the language and the technical terminology is far from transparent). Also all of the participants had other ongoing obligations; it was never possible for everyone on the team to work on the project full-time, all the time. The last three years or so were very intense and we all basically put aside as much as possible of our other research and writing to concentrate on the Huainanzi, but even so, there were courses to prepare and teach, administrative work to be done, other research and writing commitments to honor, and so on. But we were determined to work as a team rather than simply dividing up and parceling out the work (as the French group had done); we were convinced that approaching the text in a truly collaborative fashion was the key to making the translation as accurate and graceful as possible. The procedure that we adopted was complicated. We began by dividing up responsibility for doing first-draft translations of all of the 21 chapters. Then each draft was read and critiqued by all other members of the team, revised, read and critiqued again, and further revised. The aim was to make the final versions as complete, accurate, and seamless as possible, no matter who did the initial draft. From 1998 to 2009 we met for four or five very hard-working weekends per year at Brown to hash out difficult passages and discuss, for example, uniform ways of translating important terms. The last stage of translation consisted of reading the entire work aloud — taking turns, one person would read while the other three followed along in the classical Chinese text, looking for errors. That took many, many hours, but it proved to be extremely worthwhile.

Manuscript preparation itself was a big job that took about two years: peer review, revision; copy-editing, more revision; page proofs, corrections; appendices, index, etc. It was a huge undertaking just in the physical sense; the final typescript ran to over 1600 double-spaced pages.

Working as a team was really essential to the project; it was a much more complicated way of doing the task than a solo effort might have been, but the result is much better than any of us could have done alone. Intensive, long-term collaborative work is quite common in the natural sciences but relatively rare in other fields; I think that the success of this project demonstrates the merits of such close collaboration in the humanities despite its complexity and the hard work required to implement it.

The Huainanzi is full of fascinating material, and the effort of translating it was more than repaid by the intellectual challenge of doing the work and the satisfaction of having it turn out well. And we are delighted with the actual published volume, which was extremely handsomely produced by Columbia University Press. It is gratifying that the first printing sold out within three months, and the book is already in its second printing. It is very satisfying to have this work finally out in the world.

John S. Major

While there are many historical problems worthy of exploring in the study of history, I personably believe that one of the most important is an attempt to understand the process by which humans come to accept violence as legitimate. History has no monopoly on this, it is a deeply interdisciplinary issue. A second related, and equally interdisciplinary issue is to better understand the many different reasons why someone comes to accept some or all of the claims made by the institutions of power. This too, as a question of trust, is ultimately tied to legitimacy.

Like most movements aspiring to power, the Communist Party of China was also deeply interested in these questions, especially, of course, the latter. In looking through internal reports of the Treason Elimination Department (锄奸部) in Shandong from the 1930s and 1940s, I am fascinated by their emphasis on measuring and reporting not merely the elimination of the treason in question, but in the response to that elimination by the people. How did the masses respond? How many people were “mobilized” (发动) by public trial x or execution y?

I recently came across yet another source which has helped me think about, and continue to be puzzled about the two issues I opened with.

Last week I read the memoir of Sam Ginsbourg, a Russian Jew born in Siberia, but raised in Harbin, Vladivostok, and Shanghai. I’m mostly interested in Ginsbourg as a source of background information on his older brother Mark Gayn (Mark changed his name after moving to the United States), one of the most important journalists and first hand sources reporting on the complex political events of occupation Japan and Korea in the early aftermath of World War II.

Though I may post more on Mark some other time, Sam is also a very interesting figure. In 1947, as the Chinese Civil war was heating up, he travelled from Shanghai to Communist occupied Yantai (Chefoo), in Shandong province. He became a passionate supporter of Communism and a Chinese citizen in 1953. Ginsbourg took up a career in Shandong as a professor of Russian language and, whenever his card was up in political movements, as a bourgeois intellectual or Russian spy.

At least half of his memoir My First Sixty Years in China, published in 1982, deals with the long history of Communist political movements he experienced. In most cases, and especially during the Cultural Revolution, Ginsbourg found himself among the targets for attack. His own suffering and the ridiculousness of the accusations made against him and some of those close to him are described, albeit in a somewhat muted tone. Although I only skimmed through some of his encounters, it appears that he didn’t fare too badly. He wasn’t killed, and he doesn’t seem to have been severely beaten or subjected to long periods in labor camps. “On the whole,” he says, “the movements were a necessary political and ideological foundation for rapid economic growth.”¹

His closing chapter is set up as a response to a visiting American academic who tries to get him to express regret for having moved to the liberated areas in 1947 and stayed through the tumultuous decades that followed. I am not too surprised to see him defend his home, his friends, and his entire way of life in those pages, rejecting the outsider’s arrogance and looking forward with great optimism at the future. All that was missing were the cute baby chickens shown in final scene of the movie To Live (活着).

More jarring however, was Ginsbourg’s display of that characteristic disconnect between what Ginsbourg himself experienced, and acts of violence he witnessed against those he did not know personally. Whereas he knows he was not himself a Russian spy, and that the President of Shandong University was probably not guilty of the many reactionary crimes he was accused of when he was purged, he doesn’t seem able to extend the same sort of skepticism to many other cases.

We see this when he describes a realization he has as he watched, in 1950, two “reactionaries” being delivered to the execution ground.

I reflected with satisfaction how far I had come since the autumn of 1947, when I had felt shock at the sight of a woman landlord being dragged to execution. Not an iota of pity or perturbation stirred me in 1950. I felt nothing but hatred for the two who were in the truck.”²

Later at Qingdao stadium (From Brazzaville to Kabul, from Pyongyang to Kigali, stadiums serve well for executions when you want to maximize impact) with, he claims, 50,000 in attendance, he watched the trial of two “ringleaders” of a secret religious society.

The woman – the abbess of a monastery – had caused the death of several ‘believers’, cheating hundreds of others of large sums of money and committed other crimes. The old man had raped sixty nuns of his nunnery, some of whom had died.

After the trial the two of them were led, or rather dragged, around the track of the stadium for everybody to see. As they rounded the huge arena, a roar of shouts followed them until they were hauled onto trucks and driven off.

The movement taught me and, I believe, others – who like myself had been born and had grown up in towns, especially those coming from well-to-do families – how horrible were the crimes that had been committed and were still being committed against the common people, how deep was the popular hatred toward the evildoers and how just the deserts. It was the best, the most practical, the most effective kind of education; and I have always thought myself lucky to have gone through it.³

Is it possible the two “ringleaders” were in fact murderers and rapists? It is certainly possible. For example, my own reading of reports from the period suggests that the Party often capitalized on the huge anger felt by local villagers against an infamous bandit or local puppet military commander. Punishing real evildoers is not just good justice, it is good politics. And yet it is just as possible that, like so many thousands of victims of the campaigns against religious organizations and secret societies in the late 1940s and early 1950s, these two leaders of religious societies had committed only the crime of leading an organization targeted by the party for complete liquidation or full co-optation. Accusing the leaders of outlandish and horrific crimes is the fastest way to demoralize and discredit such an organization, setting into motion a wave of self-criticisms and struggle sessions for other members who might then emerge cleansed of their crime of association – at least until the next movement needed a target.

Writing his memoir towards the end of his long life in China, Sam Ginsbourg wrote about that encounter and his realization at that moment without adding a word of doubt or reflection from the perspective of someone who had been a far more fortunate victim of criminal accusations. It seems that, indeed, it was a most effective kind of education.

1. Sam Ginsbourg, My First Sixty Years in China (Beijing: Foreign Language Press Beijing, 1982), 247.
2. Ibid., 209.
3. Ibid., 210.