Jottings from the Granite Studio

Back in Beijing, pipes frozen and busted.  Ayi broke the lock on the front door. Plants are dead.  Cats are in a state of vexation.  Good to be home, though.

Somehow in my Christmas vacation travels I missed this excellent China Beat essay on Han nationalism and Wolf Totem.  Be sure to check it out. (h/t Blood and Treasure)

Back in Beijing on Monday.

Part personal memoir, part history, Eddie Cheng’s Standoff at Τiananmen is a straightforward chronological retelling of the events which led up the 1989 student demonstrations and crackdown in Τiananmen Square.

Eddie Cheng was a student at Peking University in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the first half of the book reads like a personal memoir of those turbulent and exciting times. It is here the book makes its greatest contribution: While the stories of 1989 have been oft told, the critical events of the early 1980s, which gave shape to the ideas and actions of the students in the square, are too often shunted off as a mere prologue or a quick bit of expository background before getting to the truly dramatic images from the “Beijing Spring.”

Cheng’s book clearly chronicles the student agitation at Bei Da and other universities in the early 1980s.  Student demands in the handbills posted in Peking University’s famous “Triangle,” or the speeches by Fαng Lizhi and others seem brazen by 2010 standards.  Cheng even spares a moment for the absurd, including a story of how then Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin responded to student hecklers by reciting a part of the Gettysburg Address in English “to show his knowledge of Western democracy.”

While clearly and openly sympathetic to the student movements of the era, Cheng does not spare the students (or their leaders); this is not a hagiography.  Students of the 1980s demonstrated a complex mélange of motivations: individual expression, economic security, as well as a desire for political change.  The students in Cheng’s book often appear much more excited by the chance to study abroad as they do about reforming society back home.

(One priceless image is that of the student demonstrators in 1989, sitting in the square under the warm May sun, studying their TOEFL and GRE books to pass the time.)

Nevertheless, to dismiss demands for greater political openness as a naive rabble led astray by “bourgeois liberalization” or to set up opposition to Party policies as a zero-sum competition between stability and chaos is also to miss the point.

The Chinese government today overreacts to even the slightest challenge to its authority, cheered on by Party lackeys at home and by their apologists abroad.  The Party, having in 1989 suffered a breakdown of order and the most direct challenge yet to its very legitimacy, realized the problem of intellectual openness.  Their response was chilling in its brilliance.  After 1989, the Party retreated from so many areas of society, giving the illusion of a lighter touch even as it vigorously rooted out any hint of a challenge or dissent.  The urban middle class found comfort in a Faustian bargain that guaranteed them the material markers of success in exchange for their acquiescence.

It’s wise to remember that the greatest trick the Devil ever played was to convince the world he didn’t exist.

Like many of his generation, Eddie Cheng left China in the early 1980s to study in the US and so the second half of his book, and his narrative of the events of 1989, relies on the memories of the student leaders who participated directly in the demonstrations.

This is problematic, because as most know, much has been made of the self-serving behavior on the part of those leaders both in the square and in the years since.  When Cheng switches from his own memories to those of others, the book loses a great deal of its analytical heft, though to be fair Cheng does not shrink from describing the foibles and infighting among the different groups of students.  In particular, Cheng portrays Chαi Ling and Wυ’er Κaixi – to put it kindly – as having a keen sense of the moment.

(In fact there are times in the book where – and let’s keep in mind the relative ages of the actors here – the bickering and bantering read a bit like “Real World: Τiananmen” with less tequila and more tanks, but I digress.)

What Cheng’s book lacks in critical analysis of student motivations, he makes up for in telling details (people cheating on hunger strikes, the yearning to go abroad, the sexual frustration of the young) that remind the reader that the simplistic formulations of good/evil as seen on CNN masked a much more complicated situation.  On the government side, Cheng’s book also highlights the attempts by CCP official Yang Mingfu who attempted to act as something of an honest broker and defuse the situation.  Yang’s role gives a more nuanced view of official accommodation beyond “Ζhao Ζiyang in the square crying into his megaphone.”

Standoff at Τiananmen is a good book for the non-specialist who wants a blow-by-blow account of the events of 1989 or for students of recent Chinese history seeking more insight into the nature of student activism in the early 1980s.

Things I’ve discovered since I’ve been home: New television (hockey in HD=awesome), bad television (the car crash that is the “Jersey Shore”), and good television (the brilliant “Sons of Anarchy.”)

Okay, so I’m lazy.  Here then are the top seven posts of Jottings from the Granite Studio.  Good luck in 2010.

Cai Yuanpei and Charter 08 January 17, 2009 “To dismiss the importance of Charter 08 because it is the product of a single class (or sub-group within that class) is to miss a lesson of history.  With a nod to Margaret Mead, I might suggest that modern Chinese history has had its own share of small groups of committed individuals whose ideas did not receive their due when first published or spoken but whom we now look back upon as transformational figures.”

On the wrong side of history January 27, 2009 “The counter to “Τιbet is part of China and history says so” is not “Τιbet is not part of China and history says so” but rather “How can you be so sure? Did you look at it this way?””

The Historical Record for February 17, 2009: The 30th Anniversary of the Sino-Vietnamese War February 17, 2009 “The war is almost completely forgotten in China but in Vietnam it is remembered as the last in a series of brutal foreign invasions of their territory.”

Lonely Boys and Losers: Are we overstating the fenqing phenomenon March 15, 2009 “For me, the defining characteristic of a fenqing is not strong belief in a particular view, but rather an inability to accept that other valid perspectives might exist.”

List of possible embarrassing revelations in Zhao Ziyang Memoir due out this summer May 15, 2009 “#4: “I banged Chai Ling.””

Notes from a Non-Anniversary June 4, 2009 “I woke up this morning and took a short walk to a big square.  As expected, it was pretty calm in the kind of jittery, strained, composed way one usually associates with a dinner party where one of the hosts is having an extramarital affair with one of the guests.”

60th Anniversary Hangover October 2, 2009 “Did anybody else consider the possibility that Hu Jintao was pantless during his limo ride? Mao would have been.  Count on it.”

Christmas in Montpelier, VT.  We’re up here visiting my sister and I have to say…it’s been a nice break from the daily grind of Beijing living.  YJ and I are constantly amazed over such commonalities as “pedestrian right of way” and “customer service.”

Having a bit of a break from family to-do’s, we wandered around the downtown area and found ourselves at the Vermont History Museum.  $5 per person meant entrance and brochure and as we meandered our way through Abenaki wigwams and farmers cabins, I was struck by how much I had become accustomed to China’s museum culture.

Apart from the obvious (not being reminded every ten minutes to warmly love the Party and the Motherland), I was struck once again how, in the hands of thinking and thoughtful historians, the narrative of history — whether in words, pictures, or artifacts — can give a visitor a greater appreciation for a place and its people even if that narrative includes uncomfortable truths.  The entry way to the exhibits is an Abenaki wigwam with information markers describing the horrific fate of those people as European settlers made their way into Vermont during the 17th and 18th centuries.  Vermont’s participation in the Revolutionary War gives as much space to the ongoing struggles between settlers and land grant holders as it does to larger issues of a new nation fighting against the British crown.  The development of agriculture and quarrying in Vermont is balanced by discussions of unionization and environmental degradation.  An 18-minute film juxtaposes legislative debates from centuries past over abolition and women’s suffrage with the divisive battle from earlier this decade over civil unions.

History doesn’t only have to be a celebration of what is, it can also be a story of what might have been.  It can talk about the past, the good and the bad, and its relationship to the present.  It can inspire and inform, even when events of the past make us reflect on the cruelty of humanity.  The past can teach.  But only if it is allowed to speak ill sometimes.

Those who censor the past atrophy our understanding of history and do an injustice to those who came before.

Like many, YJ and I have been following the trial of Liu Χiaobo.  That the trial was scheduled for the Christmas holiday so that it might somehow escape notice in the rest of the world is just another in a staggering assortment of evidence that Liu’s persecutors are cowardly and despicable.  I’d go on at length, but I will instead urge you to read this erudite and powerful commentary by C. Custer at ChinaGeeks.  Go there now.

Interesting little post on The Beijinger blog last week.  Seems one of our fellow Lao Wai had a holiday gathering which — as these things do — went late, got a bit loud, and thus resulted in an oddly frantic clash with some of his elderly neighbors.  I say frantic, because a simple noise complaint degenerated into (sequentially) a verbal confrontation, an awkward fist fight, a blockade, and then a trip to the local paichusuo/police station to sort the matter out.  (Skip to the end: 200 RMB to the aggrieved neighbors, bargained down from 500 RMB.)

Not exactly an unusual tale in our city.  Once when I was at IUP, I recall a similar event which ended with the downstairs neighbor striding into the room in a pink bathrobe and launching into a prolonged monologue on the nature of sleep, culture, and 5000 years of Chinese history.  (I wish I was making that last part up…)

In any case — actually in every case — it always seems to come down to ‘culture.’  In the Beijinger post, the police offer a semi-serious lecture on “respecting Chinese culture and customs.”

Which to me is pretty funny.

I live in a hutong, in a two-room pingfang in a larger dazayuan/yard which has about 35 other households.  I can tell you that an aversion to “noise pollution” and an innate selfless compulsion toward neighborly harmony are not a part of any kind of essentialist “Chinese culture.”  Our next door neighbor feels no particular cultural qualms about blasting techno at all hours of the day or night or getting into screaming matches with his “Lao Po“.*  And here’s the reason why: Culture has nothing to do with it, our neighbor is simply a selfish douchebag.

That’s the dirty little secret.  Foreigners in Beijing would like to believe that shoving people out of the way in a queue is “part of Chinese culture,” and Chinese would like to believe that selfish breaches of the social compact are a uniquely ‘foreign’ phenomenon (along with things like “cheese” and “AIDS”).  But neither is completely true.

There will always be disagreeable dickheads.  It doesn’t matter what where they come from, no cultural group (however defined) is free from the curse of ‘douchebag-ism.’  If only wishing made it so…

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*We say “Lao Po” though the other neighbors say she’s not his wife, but just the latest in a series of live-ins.  It’s a pretty odd matchup, between them they have like eight teeth, three dogs, and a collective IQ of 75.  Seriously, it’s like a PSA for preventative dentistry or the dangers of letting children gnaw on lead paint.

It’s Christmas here in NH and I’ll be enjoying the festivities with friends and family for a few days.  I’ll be back next week with new posts but until then…happy holidays to everyone!

We’re busy getting ready for our annual trip to New Hampshire.  It’s strange that on today, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, that thanks to the international date line our Monday is going to be approximately 36 hours long.  But anyway…as I prepare to go back to the United States for a few weeks, I am reminded about what it means to be away from home — what it means to willingly choose to live someplace where the rules are different and life requires a daily practice of acceptance and adaption — and I recall one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite writers.

“When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped.  To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand.  This chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes.”

– Jack London, “In a Far Country”

If the British takeover of Hong Kong was the moral equivalent of three guys kicking in the back door and at gunpoint turning your suburban home into a crack house, then the Portuguese in Macau were more like a couple of shady dudes who wanted to rent out your old tool shed, hoped you’d forget they were there, and when you reminded them that it was time to pay up and that you’d strongly prefer they NOT set up a craps game on your property or pimp out your children they decided to stiff you on the rent and declare squatters’ rights in your backyard.

On the evening of December 19, 1999, the flag of Portugal was lowered for the final time in Macau and at midnight on December 20, the tiny former colony officially became a part of the People’s Republic of China…more or less.

I say more or less because, unlike its glitzy neighbor Hong Kong, the nature of Macau’s sovereignty and even its status as a “colony” has frequently been open to debate and interpretation.

The Portuguese first showed up in the early 16^th century, using the waters around the peninsula and islands as an anchorage and a temporary refuge for traders.  In 1552, the Portuguese built storage sheds to dry out trade goods, following that up a few years later by erecting a couple of stone huts and then…you know, since they “improved” the property and all…they asked if they could rent the place for awhile.  The Ming government — never having heard of Steve Wynn — approved the deal and for the next three centuries the Portuguese had de facto control over Macau, paying rent to the Ming (later Qing) court in Beijing.  The decision in 1583 to create a local assembly of Macanese settlers and the appointment by Lisbon of a series of governors strengthened the hand of the Portuguese in managing the affairs of the settlement, but the exercise of power was not uncontested and had to be carried out by negotiating competing interests among Portugal, the Macanese settlers, and local Chinese officials.

For centuries after, Macau played an important historical role as a transit point in the long journey between East and West.  In addition to its role, gradually eclipsed by Hong Kong, as an important port in the growing European trade along the Pacific rim, it was also an entry point into China for missionaries, most notably the Jesuits who played such an important role in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as a conduit of ideas between Europe and Asia.  In the mid-19^th century, following the abolition of outright slavery in many parts of the world, Macau became a key port for the shipment overseas of “coolie” laborers.  For many Chinese — some escaping poverty and war, others simply kidnapped from villages and towns in South China — Macau would be the last they would ever see of their homeland as they boarded ships bound for hard labor in far flung lands.

While Portugal’s reach as a global power had significantly declined by the 19^th century, the Portuguese were more than happy to piggy-back on British attempts to hijack Qing sovereignty during the Opium War of 1840-1842.  In 1849, Portuguese authorities kicked out the Qing officials and decided to simply stop paying rent, figuring if the Qing government really wanted Macau back they could come and get it. This arrangement was formalized under the 1887 Sino-Portuguese Treaty which recognized Portugal’s continued administration of Macau in perpetuity.

(If the whole thing were a bar fight, Britain would be the guy punching some poor sap in the mouth for “looking at him funny” while Portugal would be Britain’s friend, staring down at the guy lying on the floor surrounded by the bloody chiclets of his former teeth and asking him if he’s not going to finish his beer can Portugal have it?)

Not that the 1887 treaty settled a whole lot.  Macau’s territory is a fraction the size of Hong Kong and has always been dependent on outside sources for critical resources like, say, food and water.  Moreover, unlike in the case of Hong Kong, the Sino-Portuguese Treaty only transferred administrative control – not full sovereignty – of Macau to Portugal, leaving the exact status of the settlement a matter of interpretation.  As a result, maintaining the legitimacy and position of Portuguese rule over Macau always required a delicate balancing act on the part of Lisbon and her representatives in the territory.

With the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, this “matter of interpretation” began to get a bit sticky, and a series of anti-government riots in the 1960s served notice to the Portuguese administrators that they may have started to overstay their welcome by a few centuries.  Portuguese politics back home further muddied the Macanese waters, when following a coup in 1974 Lisbon began to reassess the status of its overseas holdings.  Finally, in 1987, the joint Sino-Portuguese commission worked out the framework by which control of Macau was handed over to the PRC in 1999.

Naturally, state media in the PRC (and on Macau) are making a bit of hay over the 10-year anniversary of the handover, though how you can have a news story about Macau in the 21^st century that doesn’t include the words “casino” or “gambling” repeated as many times as possible in the first two paragraphs is beyond me.  Nevertheless, adding this final (or penultimate, depending on your view of Taiwan) part of the Chinese territorial puzzle was an important moment for the PRC and the CCP.  For the latter, it serves to reaffirm their self-professed credentials as the only government in the past 200 years capable of protecting Chinese sovereignty against the forces of imperialism, so long as your definition of “imperialist forces” excludes gaudy, over-the-top casinos sucking money from the pockets of the Cantonese nouveau-riche.

This narrative – that the CCP was the sole force capable of ‘liberating’ China and, by implication, remains the only thing standing in the way of chaos and the resumption of unchecked foreign aggression leading to a loss of Chinese sovereignty – is an important part of the PRC origin story. Because of this, the tendency of the information and education authorities in the PRC is to turn history into a simplistic morality play of heroes and villains bleached of nuance, or else to pump up old stories with righteous indignation drenched in the nauseating syrup of victimhood.

But the thing is, this history doesn’t necessarily need any kind of embellishment or blanching.  It’s hard to make imperialism look good so I can’t for the life of me understand why the CCP feels the need to try so hard making it look bad.  That is, until I remember that when a teleological narrative of nationalist liberation is one of only two tricks in your bag (the other being “promise of economic development and increased standards of living”) you gotta go with what you’ve got.

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Sources and further reading:

Edmonds, Robert Louis. “Macau and Greater China,” The China Quarterly, No. 136 (Dec, 1993)

Gunn, Geoffrey. Encountering Macau: A Portuguese City State on the Periphery of China, 1996.

Porter, Jonathan. Macau: The Imaginary City, 1996.

Yee, Herbert S. and Lo, Sonny S.H. “Macau in Transition: The Politics of Decolonization,” Asian Survey, Vol 31, No. 10 (Oct, 1991)