花崗齋雜記 Jottings from the Granite Studio provides commentary, analysis, and opinion on China and Chinese history. It is written by Jeremiah Jenne, a PhD Candidate at a large public research university in Northern California. Currently, Jeremiah is in Beijing teaching history, doing archival research, and working on his dissertation.
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What if the Chinese government suffered from Wikileaks? In the New York Review of Books, Perry Link ponders this hypothetical as the Party wrestles to keep control of history and faces its own problems with leaked documents and a sudden boomlet in memoirs by departed (and soon-to-be departed) leaders trying to put a final spin on their legacies as they make their way up the stairs to meet Marx.
At issue is the power of archives and memory. Once opened, archives offer historians, scholars, journalists, researchers and all manner of other interested parties access to the primary stuff from which narratives are constructed. Limiting access to this information is essential for any group that seeks to maintain a particular narrative, all the more so if the archive contains materials which complicate or contradict that narrative.
George Orwell famously wrote, “He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present, controls the future.” A corollary to Orwell is: He who controls the archives — the actual room with the paper or the server with the emails — has a huge advantage in controlling that past.
Professor Link concludes:
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of reasons why Chinese officials have been so assiduous in guarding archives. One is that the prestige of the regime as a whole depends upon the image of the Party as heroic, patriotic, and the definition of modern China. The young must be taught to love the Party. Stories about internecine strife? About causing a huge famine? The people might not love us anymore, and might rebel.
The other kind of reason is much more personal. Each official has to watch out for his or her own self and family. A political “mistake” can ruin your career, even land you in prison, and archives are where your enemies can go to look for grounds to charge you with “mistakes”. Mao allowed his people to open archives to look for material on Liu Shaoqi and other enemies during the Cultural Revolution; a few years later archives were opened again as people looked for material on the Maoist “Gang of Four.”
The anonymous reporter who leaked the contents of the July 21 meeting commented on a looming atmosphere of demise at the meeting. The underlying mood, he suggested, was, We had better get control of these archives, and perhaps destroy them, before a day of reckoning is upon us.
As Beijing swirls with rumors about the ill-health of several former leaders, that day of reckoning may be closer than we think. A true history of Modern China cannot be written without access to these archives, if they are lost, so too is the ability of historians and future generations to remember and assess the legacy of the CCP.
Perhaps this is why the leaders are so worried.
 Storm clouds rolling through Inner Mongolia's Big Sky Country. Photo taken on Hulunbeir Grasslands, September 2009
It’s been a busy month and it’s only going to get worse. Over the next six weeks, I’ll be getting ready for 80 new students coming to Beijing from the US, an orientation session, two classes, two mobile learning trips (Hangzhou/Nanjing and then to Xinjiang) plus a translation for CASS and their Journal of Modern Chinese History, the beginnings of a book due in January, and I’d like to get at least one more chapter of my dissertation written before I leave for Xinjiang. By the end of next month, I should have a considerable sense of accomplishment and probably be legally qualified to begin a methadone regimen. We’ll have to see.
So those rare nights when I can join my friends Froog, Brendan, and Dave for a night of dinner, drinks, and pub quizzing are something to be treasured. Now, I’ve not pub quizzed before. But I’ve been told that my only talent is as a repository of useless trivia (hence: the history degree) and have also on more than one occasion been accused of being something of an obnoxious know-it-all (Thanks, Mom!), and…I like pubs. So this was an idea whose time had come, right?
Last evening’s pub quiz was at the 12 Square Meters Bar on Nanluoguxiang which bills itself as “smallest bar in Beijing” even though they’ve expanded considerably and now are about 45 square meters. I guess “45 Square Meter Bar” doesn’t quite ring the same way and I can understand that “smallest bar on this side of the street between the light pole and the public loo” won’t fit on the signboard. So, 12 Square Meters it is. It’s a nice place regardless, with a hospitable and friendly owner, a chill neighborhood vibe, a great drinks menu, and it remains a huge step up from the increasing number of dismal Houhai cafe/bar copies which are invading this once vibrant area.
It was also an “individual” pub quiz. Apparently, in their natural environment, pub quizzes are team affairs. This one was designed for either the solo drinker or people who just don’t play well with others.
Now, I’ve always assumed that the people who do pub quizzes regularly — like Froog — are a special breed. (There are few in the Beijing expat community who would disagree that among special breeds, Froog probably deserves his own, special-er, category, but I digress…) And it is certainly true that pub quizzes, like the GRE or marriage vows, are comprised of a series of tricky questions for which simply having information is insufficient, the answers must be presented just so and luck plays a significant role.
For example, last night one of the contestants was a young woman, originally from Brooklyn, who was in China via Scandinavia where she had just recently mastered Norwegian in eight months. (I told you: special breed) Wouldn’t you know it? One of the questions was “Name the three colors in the Norwegian Flag.” (A: Red, Blue, White) A question which she greeted with a whoop of joy and then answered while singing the Norwegian national anthem with a boozy gusto.
So of course, with me being born under a bad sign and all, in the final round the quiz master asked the following question:
“In what year did the Qing Dynasty end?”
Now I’m more than accepting of the charge that I can take any simple question and spin a complicated and nearly incoherent answer…it’s part of my charm as a teacher. If a student asked me this, I would have started on a riff about how the Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911 led to a mass secession of provinces, some tense negotiations between the central government and the provincial assemblies, the return of Sun Yat-sen with Sun taking the presidency on January 1, 1912, at which point there was both a president and an emperor, an untenable state of affairs resolved with Sun stepping down in favor of Yuan Shikai, and the court abdicating in the name of the Xuantong Emperor (Puyi) in February of 1912.
Basically, the answer is 1912.
That’s what I wrote.
Brendan, sitting across from me on a small table, looked at me and said with his usual wobbly sagacity:
“Don’t answer it the right way, answer it the way most people would answer it.”
“Yeah, but that answer is wrong.”
“Do you want to win or do you want to be right?”
Let’s just say, it’s a question I’ve been asked before in other contexts. In this case, I decided to call for a clarification.
“Do you mean the uprising that set it in motion or do you mean the actual date of abdication.”
The owner replied, “The one Wikipedia has.”
Yeah, not the right answer to give a history teacher.
So….what do I do? I of course write “1912.”
The ‘correct’ answer according to the pubmaster? 1911.
Now in the end, it didn’t matter. Froog won with a score of 39, I came in second with a score of 32. But still…
I say “1912″. As do the three textbooks I just grabbed off of the shelf in my home office (Spence, Ebrey, and William T. Rowe’s new Qing history).
Oh yeah, and Wikipedia? It says 1912, too.
Did I want to win or did I want to be right? And which way did I choose? Now that’s a thought that will keep me even busier this month…
 Roof design, Long Corridor, Summer Palace, Beijing
On twitter last week, Shanghai-based author and historian Derek Sandhaus (@dsandhaus for those who are tweet-ready) made the following comment:
“She who can truly ease the flame understands the Way.” -Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan channeling his inner Jim Morrison.”
I thought…wow, who wins in a Lizard King/Taiping smackdown?
So…channeling my inner Bill Simmons channeling his Dr. Jack, here is the breakdown:
Jim Morrison and his dead Indians, Hong Xiuquan and the Manchu demons, flaming swords, and the whole “God is my father” dream sequence in which he was commanded to purge the Earth of evil. EDGE: Hong Xiuquan
Educational achievement? Morrison famously walked out of UCLA film school and formed a rock and roll band that performed on Ed Sullivan. Hong just as famously flunked the provincial-level exams, had a nervous breakdown, and formed a God-Worshipping Society which went on to nearly topple an empire in a massive war that cost the lives of as many as 30 million people. EDGE: Hong Xiuquan
God complex? Hong Xiuquan was perhaps a bit clearer in his claims to be God’s son, but anyone who plays balance beam on the Venice Beach sea wall loudly proclaiming “I am the Lizard King, I can do anything” definitely has a sense of his own inner beast-deity. Still, son of God trumps getting in touch with your personal reptile. BIG Edge: Hong Xiuquan
Women? Well, we know Hong kept quite the harem even as he was attempting to get his followers into single-sex barracks (didn’t work too well). Jim Morrison may or may not have been married to Pamela Morrison (née Courson) while he also participated in a Wiccan wedding ritual binding him to the rock journalist Patricia Kennealy. And then there were the groupies. I suppose we can argue over who had more groupies, certainly Hong’s were better organized — that whole ‘harem’ thing again — but I can’t get over the hypocrisy of the Taiping leaders. EDGE: Jim Morrison
(Weird, but sort of relevant, social media note. On my Facebook page it once said “Connect with Patricia Kennealy: 1 Mutual Friend.” I thought…nah. Sure enough, it was THAT Patricia Kennealy. I’m still waiting for her to accept my friend request, perhaps if I hadn’t signed it “The Gecko Prince” she would have gotten back to me sooner…)
Supporting Cast? Jim Morrison had The Doors. I know people will disagree, but I love The Doors musically. Hong Xiuquan heavily relied on his back-up musicians, notably Yang Xiuqing and Shi Dakai but Jim Morrison had the good sense not to make Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger “kings” nor did John Densmore claim to speak with the voice of God (thus technically outranking Hong who was only God’s #2 son). Edge: Jim Morrison
Life after death? Both died relatively young and under mysterious circumstances. The Taiping tried to carry on under Hong Xiuquan’s 15-year-old son, who presided over the sack of the Taiping capital and was executed less than six months after taking the throne. After Jim Morrison’s death, the surviving Doors made the Other Voices album with the surviving Doors taking over vocalist duties. Hmmm….having your son lose your kingdom and then be killed in a painful and gruesome execution or listening to Ray Manzarek sing? Edge: Hong Xiuquan
Jim Morrison is awesome, but hey…Hong was an icon of bad-assdom before it was cool. I’m giving it to Hong. Feel free to disagree in the comments section.
The New York Times published an article about Han Han last week. In the article, Graham Lee, a Hong Kong native studying in Peking University was quoted saying “His way of thinking is different from that of ordinary Chinese.”
At first glance, this sentence sounds offensive. How do ordinary Chinese think? However, thinking for a second, I am not surprised that he felt this way.
In any other country, I don’t think Han Han would be that special. His criticisms and the courage to challenge authority, even the having the balls to drop out of high school, are common characteristics of young people around the world. He is a very good writer, that’s for sure, but in most places his writing wouldn’t be enough to make him one of the most popular bloggers and an iconic figure. However, in China, what Han Han says and does has value.
When I was in college, I was a fan of Han Han. His books opened my eyes and mind. For the first time in my life, I realized students could criticize and analyze profoundly the problems of the China’s education system. His words were harsh, but they were just so true.
Throughout elementary school, middle school and high school, and even in college, I thought passing exams was all that education was about. Reading books other than textbooks seemed a waste of time. And thinking about questions, rather than memorizing the expected answers on the exam, was not a required skill for getting the all-important high test scores. That was education, and I never thought about questioning what it all meant. I was one of a great number of students fed through the system. We were encouraged to obey and to follow. Anybody who challenged this system, for example dating a girl, or developing a hobby, was labeled as a problem student.
Late in my college career, after reading more books and talking with more people, I realized I spent the first 20 years of my life learning bullshit. It was all basically useless for real life. I, and hundreds of millions of students in China, had been cheated.
We don’t want to be single-minded idiots filled with minds filled by doctrines and propaganda. We love Han Han because he says what we want to say. However, it is hard for many people to speak out because their courage and their ability for independent thinking have been strangled such a long time ago. China’s education killed our chance of developing critical thinking skills and as such may well have stifled millions of other potential Han Hans.
The saddest thing is that today, millions of students in China’s education system are still suffering from the exam culture, and it’s even worse than when I was a student. Parents and teachers went through the system themselves, and they still let the same things happen to their children. However, in the big exam machine, they don’t have other options. If their children want to go to a better school and get better jobs in the future, they have to sign up for all kinds of classes and tutorials, and Olympia Maths, English courses…anything to get ahead even though it’s all completely useless, just academic hucksters looking to make a buck on the anxieties of middle class parents. Today these children are the victims of China’s educational system. Tomorrow, they will become Chinese citizens who cannot think for themselves.
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Yajun (A.K.A. Mrs. Granite Studio) works in the Beijing bureau of The Christian Science Monitor. You can read her latest article for the Monitor here. Her last posts for The Granite Studio were on the recent Chinese student demonstrations in Paris and a review of Peter Hessler’s Country Driving. She would like to strongly point out that she “is not a guest” since it’s her computer. Fair point.
Feng Xiaogang’s new movie 唐山大地震 (Aftershock) is setting all-kinds of domestic box office records this week. I haven’t seen it yet, but good friend and fellow China blogger Modern Lei Feng has reviewed the movie. He said:
When I first heard about the movie, I thought this was Feng’s way of capitalizing off the Sichuan earthquake. Going into the movie, I had low expectations, and when it started and the credits included a minute of producers and executive producers, I sat back and prepared for a movie along the lines of “Founding of the Republic”, where everyone in the Chinese movie industry was falling over themselves to play a role in the CCP’s love letter in film to itself. If not that, it would be an overly contrived attempt to cram history into a movie lacking a story like Summer Palace. Spoiler alerts below (not that there’s a lot that can be spoiled), so if you want it all to be fresh, wait until you’ve watched the movie before reading on.
This is not like either of those, it is definitely a movie with a story to tell and while the earthquake’s “aftershocks” loom large throughout the movie, the actual event is over after the first 30 minutes. That 30 minutes is incredibly moving though. I’m convinced the Red Cross should have a 30 minute informercial every year where they just show the first 25 minutes of the movie, its bound to bring in more than they’ve ever taken in before. It gets pretty graphic with parts of buildings constantly falling and crushing people and while it feels like the quake scene goes on for a long time, it probably is over in a few minutes.
As movies — and especially domestically produced ‘blockbusters’ — go, Aftershock sounds like a winner. Though…anything has GOT to be better than Founding of the Republic, and by “anything” I am including having a rabid iguana shoved into your intestinal cavity and your rectum sewn shut.
But nobody comes here for my taste in movies, so what about the historical aspects of the film? In The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report, Shen Hong criticized the movie, writing that while moving and heartwarming, the film generally glossed over the social and political context for the tragedy and overlooked key factors in the disaster, such as officials ignoring earthquake warnings in the weeks leading up to the quake and the slow recovery due to the Chinese government’s decision to turn down foreign aid in the aftermath.
Shen quotes blogger and commentator Shi Shusui:
“Without the particular historical background, ‘Aftershock’ is undoubtedly a wonderful movie of moral education… Regrettably, history is history. It can’t be wiped out or eliminated,” wrote Shi Shusi, one of China’s leading current-affairs commentators and bloggers.
“It seems it would go against an artist’s conscience to keep evading or even whitewashing previous tragedies without undergoing any deep self-reflection or genuine repentance,” Shi added.
But is that really the point of historical dramas? Does it always need to be about the suffering?
On his blog, Bruce Hume translated an excerpt from an interview with the adapter of the screenplay, Su Xiaowei who, Humes reminds us, also moonlights on the Film Review Board at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).
“Besides [changes to] the structure of the story, the movie also “performed major surgery” on the theme; the basic tone of the story was altered from one of darkness and pain, to one of warmth and hope [in the film]. The novelist Zhang Ling intended to convey that even after the disaster was over, the ravaged land gradually flattened and structures rebuilt, the blood from the wounds scratched open by the earthquake in the souls of children continued to ooze silently long thereafter”
Later she adds:
Film is a mass medium that speaks to greater numbers of viewers, and it’s not like a book that represents a more ‘personalized’ account. After all, a film should offer a sense of warmth and consolation.
I felt like I needed an expert opinion and so I turned to James Palmer. James is the author of The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia and is currently working on a new book about the Tangshan earthquake. Last week, in his secret identity as mild-mannered op-ed editor for The Global Times English edition, James had this to say about the new movie:
When I went to see Aftershock, I was expecting it to match its Chinese title, The Great Tangshan Earthquake. As it turned out, the 1976 earthquake, which killed at least a quarter of a million people, was over in the first 15 minutes, which then turned into a family drama spanning the next 30 years.
As a historian of the Tangshan Earthquake, I was a little disappointed; it was like going to see Titanic and watching the boat sink in the first half hour.
I asked James if he would comment on the Wall Street Journal blog post, and expand his thoughts about the historicity of Feng Xiaogang’s movie. This is his reply:
The earthquake prediction stuff is bollocks, and pseudoscience for the most part. It comes up sometimes in conversations with Tangshanese, but all the seismologists I spoke to, Chinese and foreign, were scathing about it. Nobody can predict earthquakes reliably; China had a lucky experience with the Haicheng earthquake, where it was successfully predicted (and an evacuation took place) because of a series of foreshocks, and there were general predictions of a a possible earthquake in the Hebei belt, but it’s a far cry from that to calling a time, date, and scale, never mind what would have been required – closing down one of the foremost industrial cities in China and evacuating 1.6 million people.
Qinglong County, a couple of hundred miles away in the mountains, did carry out an evacuation based on local signs and judgements, and had no casualties – but, based on conducting interviews with locals, they seem to have also quite significantly exagerated the scale of their evacuation and the threat posed afterwards; I spoke to local village and militia heads who had heard nothing of a prediction or evacuation, and Qinglong is a long, long way from the epicenter, so even villages that didn’t evacuate (most of them) suffered no fatalities.
What the movie didn’t show was that the PLA efforts were concentrated almost entirely in the centre of Tangshan, so that people living on the outskirts didn’t see any form of relief for a week, and most of the surrounding countryside – where the fatality rate was also very high and the damage devastating – saw no sign of gov’t relief at all.
It’s always tough to do history as movie. The demands of entertainment strain against the weight of what actually (or what we think might actually) have happened. But it sounds like Aftershock is worth seeing, even if some of the details are a little amiss. Besides, I could use a good cry.
From a reader in Sichuan:
Just an aside (and yes, this will be a threadjack), I was wondering if anyone here could help me out with ‘the great laowai’ debate I am having here. I have been living in China for 2 years, I HATE to be called laowai (because of the informal connotation of lao3, because hey, if you don’t know me, you gotta keep some formality… for example, once I accidentally called my then future-father-in-law laoshu, and he got SUPER pissed, etc). One of my friends who has been here a hella long time agrees, another does not. Waiguoren is a ok. Hell, somebody could call me wairen. Am I being overly sensitive, or should I be resigned to my fate to be people’s dear foreigner here?
Also, where the hell did the term come from?
This is one of those topics that is perennial fodder for China bloggers. (See these posts in 2005, 2008, and 2010 as well as my own take on the subject back in 2006. ) Is Laowai a term of respect or of contempt?
I asked Yajun and this was her response:
After all this time, it’s become a label, a way to separate “us” and “them.” For some people it’s a neutral term. Phoenix TV uses ‘laowai’ all the time because it sounds more casual and colloquial than ‘waiguoren.’ Some people do use it as a way to put down foreigners, assuming that foreigners are ignorant or clueless. People in the rural areas though, and this is just my opinion, don’t mean anything bad by it, it’s just the only term they know for foreigners.
My somewhat simplistic take on it is: It depends. Language is not only about the words but about other signifiers which indicate the meaning behind the words. There is also the all-mighty context. Being called a ‘laowai’ by my friends over beers is obviously less annoying than somebody muttering it under the breath as an epithet or having it shouted at me from a passing motor scooter by some guy who thinks a tiled squatter is the height of modernity.
For the most part though, I equate Chinese who use the word “Laowai” with the morons back in the US who still use the word Oriental whenever they see someone of Asian descent. It’s less the offensiveness of the word than the fact that using “Laowai” (or Oriental) screams to the world: “I am too stupid and ignorant to realize the diversity of people who are not like myself.”
In any case, I highly doubt this will be the last blog post to try and reconcile the term Laowai. But it’s certainly something that people ask about all the time, especially my students.
Of course, we can also indulge in every foreigner’s favorite airport game. The next time you fly back from China, just wait until you get off the plane and into the baggage claim. Guaranteed at least one idiot is going to say something like “Aiya, zheme duo laowai” (Wow! There are a lot of laowai”). At which point you can lean over and in your best putonghua remind them that: “Duibuqi, zai zher NI shi laowai.” (Sorry, here YOU are the ‘laowai’!) Silly? Sure. Childish? You bet. But we’ve all done it and it’s a helluva lot of fun.
 The village of Cuandixia, located about 60 miles from Beijing, is well-known for its accidental architectural preservation and dusty mountain scenery. It's becoming a little too touristy over the past few years, but is still a nice getaway from the city.
Apparently Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi didn’t take it too well when Secretary Hillary Clinton last week essentially called “bullshit” on some of China’s more creative and ambitious claims to the South China Sea. According to US and Asian officials present at the meeting:
“Foreign Minister Yang reacted by leaving the meeting for an hour. When he returned, he gave a rambling 30-minute response in which he accused the United States of plotting against China on this issue, seemed to poke fun at Vietnam’s socialist credentials and apparently threatened Singapore”
Safe to say, it probably wasn’t Minister Yang’s best day on the job…
 Map of Zheng He's voyages Perhaps no Chinese historical figure causes more eye-rolling among historians than the super-naval-bad-ass-7-foot-tall-could-have-discovered-America-but-didn’t-even-if-I’m-a-eunuch-Columbus-still-couldn’t-carry-my-jock admiral Zheng He.* He’s someone that students often ask about, and I’ve written a few posts over the years on the different Zheng He controversies which bubble to the surface of the popular press from time to time.
Like a lot of other historical figures, Zheng He’s story and image are often appropriated as stand-ins for the controversy du jour, whether it’s China in Africa, or China’s rise as a regional naval power capable of projecting force into the waters of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean…coincidentally, Zheng He’s old sailing ground. This past week, a team of Chinese archaeologists have been searching off the coast of Kenya for a shipwreck that some believe was a part of Zheng He’s Ming-era armada.
But what was Zheng He’s mission?
In China, Zheng He is usually depicted as an explorer and diplomat, as in this People’s Daily editorial from 2005 marking the 600th anniversary of Zheng He’s departure:
Zheng He led the ancient world history and the friendly exchanges among different nations, setting a shining example of the history of the exchanges of human civilization.
More recently, Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo told a meeting of ASEAN leaders that Zheng He was a symbol of China’s openness and benevolent intentions, even as China expands its economic and military reach overseas.
“I want to assure you that China is not to be feared.
“The voyages of Zheng He, he said, had brought “porcelain, silk and tea rather than bloodshed, plundering or colonialism” – a reference to violent coercive measures used by Western colonisers.
“To this day, Zheng He is still remembered as an envoy of friendship and peace,” Mr Dai said.
In the same article, however, Geoff Wade, an Australian historian and one of the leading experts on Zheng He and his voyages, offered a different interpretation of Zheng He’s expeditions.
Prof Geoff Wade, a historian who has translated Ming documents relating to Zheng’s voyages, disputes the portrayal of a benign adventurer.
He says the historical records show the treasure fleets carried sophisticated weaponry and participated in at least three major military actions; in Java, Sumatra and Sri Lanka.
“Because there is virtually no critical analysis of these texts even now – history writing is still in the hands of the state – it’s very difficult for Chinese people to conceive of the state as being dangerous, expansionist, or offensive in any way to its neighbours.
“Chinese nationalism is fed on ignorance of its past relations. The way Zheng He is being represented is part of this.”
To say that Zheng He was an “envoy of friendship and peace” is a bit disingenuous. To paraphrase a bit from one of my all-time favorite movies, Snatch: You don’t send an armada that large and that well armed unless you’re trying to say something. The Ming court was trying to prove a very specific point.
On the other hand, these expeditions were of a very different nature than the armed traders/raiders who set sail from Western European ports a few decades later. Zheng He had no interest in colonizing Africa or Southeast Asia, just as long as the people he met could agree that the Ming emperor was the baddest Mofo in the world, he was happy. And the tribute they gave was a nice touch too…
I suspect though, given the ongoing brouhaha of China’s rise and its regional intentions, this isn’t the last time that old Zheng He’s legacy will be hotly contested.
UPDATE
I hope everybody gets a chance to check out the links which Geoff Wade has left in the comments section of this post.
The first is an index of Zheng He references in the Ming shilu, translated by Professor Wade.
The second is a paper by Professor Wade entitled “The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment.”
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*I have no idea where the whole seven feet tall thing started. Of the many stories I’ve read about Zheng He, the fact that he could have played power forward for the Celtics is not one of them.
I know that when writing reviews it’s important to focus on the book and less so on the author. I’m breaking this rule. Jefferey Wasserstrom has to be on of the most tireless writers/scholars on China today. Seriously, I have no idea when he sleeps. He teaches history at UC Irvine, supervises a very dynamic group of graduate students, is the author of numerous articles, a blogger for Huffington Post, the driving force behind The China Beat, and in the last three years has published three books: the wry and observant China’s Brave New World – And Other Tales for Global Times (2007), the ambitious scholarly work Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009), and now a new book with a perhaps even more ambitious premise, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2010). Just this past week, he’s finished up a month long series of talks at M on the Bund in Shanghai.
The man is a force of nature.
Moreover, Professor Wasserstrom is a model for bridging the divide between good academic scholarship and the needs of a general readership, a divide that seems all the more wide when it comes to writing about China. The term “public intellectual” is a fraught term, but I think it’s fair to say that it is a mantle which Jeffrey Wasserstrom has taken on for himself and it is one which he wears well.
Now, what about the book?
Well, it’s short. 135 pages hardly seems sufficient for such an ambitious title, but that’s part of the conceit. Professor Wasserstrom isn’t writing an encyclopedia so much as a highly-condensed briefing book which would be valuable reading for any journalist, traveler, or student about to step off the plane at Beijing’s Terminal Three.
As Professor Wasserstrom writes in his “Author’s Note:”
“The goal of this book is to help normalize discussions of China, a country that is too often seen as — to use the cliché — inscrutable. My aim is to clear up sources of Western misunderstanding about China, provide insights into issues of significance relating to it, and above all, reveal that, though it can be dauntingly complex, we can arrive at a basic understanding of its nature.” (Wasserstrom, 2010, p. xv)
The book is organized as an FAQ with chapters proceeding, more or less chronologically. The book moves from “What were Confucius’ core ideas,” (education, ritual, and hierarchical yet reciprocal relationships) to “Why did the Qing Dynasty Fall,” (external imperialism and internal structural weaknesses) “What happened after Sun Yat-sen became president,” (Yuan Shikai nudged him to one side); to questions of a more recent vintage, “How do ordinary Chinese feel about Mao,” (the gamut from nostalgia to fury, admiration to disdain) “What is the real story of the Tiananmen Uprising,” (not only by students and not only about democracy) and “How do U.S. and Chinese views on Tibet differ?” (Americans think Tibetans are cuddly and oppressed, Chinese think that Tibet is part of China), etc.
Specialists in different fields will no doubt wish for more details to fill in key gaps. In my own area, I could lament that there was obviously a lot more going on in China in the 19th century than the Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer Uprising. (The self-strengthening movement gets a couple of sentences.) Which I suppose is being a bit greedy, since all the other dynasties from the Xia through to the Ming are covered in the span of about four pages, one of which is devoted to Zheng He.
But despite questions of what should have been included, the basic information in the book is quite sound and the concision with which Professor Wasserstrom presents these complex topics will be appreciated by people who are more interested in jumping right in and understanding China’s past and present than wading through a blow-by-blow of the different dynasties. The book also comes with an excellent and up to date recommended readings list, so readers interested in learning more about, for example, “How did China’s rulers avoid falling prey to the ‘Leninist extinction?’ are directed to David Shambaugh’s China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation.
I’m teaching a class this summer (and next year) on Understanding China. It’s an introductory class for our Contemporary Issues Program here at the Beijing Center. I’ve been using Wasserstrom’s book (along with a similar book by Rana Mitter, Modern China: A Very Short Introduction) as a way of setting up the basic questions and giving the students some background on various issues before we delve into more detailed readings. It’s been a successful strategy so far, especially because so many of the questions which make up China in the 21st Century are the same ones my students ask each semester, and also, I suspect, ones Professor Wasserstrom has heard in his own classes.
If I were heading over to China for the first time and wanted a readable and information-packed read for the flight over, this is the book I would take with me on the plane. Highly Recommended.
On last week’s Sinica podcast, host Kaiser Kuo along with Jeremy Goldkorn and Will Moss held a semi-serious wake for the English-language China blogosphere:
The China blog is officially dead, moribund, cadaverous, extinct, buried, bereft of life, defunct and totally-and-utterly-inert. It could even be said to be resting in peace, save for the fact that Will Moss drove a silver stake through its heart before recording this podcast. “We single-handedly made the China blog obsolete,” he joked in our studio after further sawing off its head. But he has a point. Because who reads blogs these days?
Well…true enough. I remarked a few weeks ago at a small gathering of…China bloggers that these days “blogs were essentially repositories for content disbursed and shared via RSS readers and Twitter.” I know that I do much of my blog-reading on Google Reader and I’ll admit that I get irked if I have to click too far to read. If your RSS feed provides the full article, I’m just that much more likely to read your stuff.
While Twitter and the like haven’t completely killed the blog, they have done a number on the state of blog commentary. As many (if not both) of my readers know, I’ve gone back and forth over the last year or so on allowing comments, finally deciding to keep the comments section active. Part of my original notion was that I felt I was getting the most substantive commentary and feedback on Facebook or Twitter. Long time commentators, who also double as friends, began leaving comments on my Facebook page rather than the comments section of the blog. At first, it was kind of nice because we could discuss the posts without some moronic fenqing barging in an blathering about the Western media after seeing the post title had the word “Tibet” in it. But then I wondered…
As the Sinica podcast noted and even, to an extent, celebrated, the English-language China blogosphere (especially the Beijing chapter) has always been incestuous . It was quite a cozy little circle jerk whereby we all linked to/re-posted bits of information that were then picked up by the foreign correspondents in Beijing who wrote articles that we then linked to and re-posted…a cycle of dispatches and blog posts which tended to present China through the haze of Zhongnanhai cigarettes and the dyspeptic cynicism of jaded Lao Wai. This trend seemed to accelerate when we all moved to Twitter.
One of the greatest intellectual traps of the Internet age is that of confirmation bias, a danger all the more real with the closing of discussions into balkanized self-selected blobs of like-minded “friends” and “followers.” I realized that I was missing a lot of ideas and opinions by not having comments, so I reopened them and I’m glad I did. Yes, I still get the freakshow nationalist trolls, but I also get called out by people who actually read the posts and that only makes for a better discussion (and, selfishly, helps make me a better writer).
I also think that in the last year or so there has been a…renaissance, rebirth, restoration in the English-language China blogosphere, and here I mean restoration in its classical sense, that of a 中興, or a moment in which the decline of an age or a dynasty is arrested, usually though the actions of a vigorous leader or group of officials, and there is a final bright spot of dynastic fortunes before the inevitable slide into history’s dustbin. The most well-known example is perhaps the Tongzhi Restoration of the 1860s. I do think that blogs, as daily diaries of thoughts (and, yes, jottings) are not the future but that doesn’t mean that a few bright spots aren’t going to keep the blogosphere alive for the time being. I shall enjoy it while it lasts.
Four years ago next week, I started this blog. (Real die-hards may also remember an earlier, more inchoate version which ran in 2005.) The first post was a short one entitled, appropriately enough, “Why Write?”
There is something about a blog that is inherently narcissistic. Here are my thoughts! Look at me!Look at me! The elitist in me dismisses blogs as mass chatterings. Even considering my own chatterings, I wonder if they are worth the tiny bits of bytes required to publish these musings to the world. (Or at least to the half-dozen people who actually might stumble across this site.)
So it is my plan to keep the personal musings to a minimum and concentrate more on the professional. There will be thoughts, random and otherwise, on China and things Chinese and other ideas, perhaps more random, on affairs in other parts of the world. That said, be prepared for the occasional stream of consciousness meanderings on those things that manage to hold my attention for more than a passing moment. Occasional profanity-laden tirades may also appear as decided by the whims of Boston’s assorted sports franchises or the fortunes, good or bad, of Arsenal.
The decision to write a blog as an aspiring historian was a little out there. When I first started there were few academic history blogs, and I suspect that my blogging was viewed by colleagues (and perhaps my professors) as at best a waste of time, and at worst a potentially career-crippling body of half-formed thoughts and opinions available to any prospective employer in a 0.4-second Google search. After four years though I’d say it’s been worth it.
I think of all the friends and contacts around the world I have made through the blog, how when I landed back in Beijing in 2006 it seemed I had a ready-made social circle, people who are still my best China friends to this day. Yeah, maybe the Beijing blogging community is not as tight as it was back “in the good old days,” but I like to think that one reason I have such a fascinating group of acquaintances — including a trio of curmudgeons named Will, Jeremy, and Kaiser — is because of blogging.
The blog is dead, long live the blog. For now.
We’re away this weekend (not in Chengde!) and so I’m turning the blog over to a guest host…kind of like the old Mike Douglas show but not nearly as hip. This is a guest post from my former student Matthew “Maxiu” Bruzzese, who I will always remember fondly for his short film starring a Zombie Mao leading the “跳舞跳舞大革命”. Enjoy and I’ll be back next week.
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This past weekend, I took a four hour train ride to Chengde* with 3 friends for what we expected would be a relaxing weekend of hiking and sightseeing. First, a word on Chengde: it’s really not a bad city. Really. I’ve visited some truly depressing cities in my time here, and I wouldn’t count Chengde among them by a long shot. The hiking that we got to do was pleasant, and the Puning temple features a 42-armed, 73-foot statue of the Guanyin Bodhisattva which puts the Lama Temple to shame. By all accounts, the Summer Palace and recreation of Lhasa’s Potala Temple are also great. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to see the latter two, for despite its attractive scenery and interesting history, we soon discovered that Chengde doesn’t exactly take kindly to outsiders.
Our trouble began following an excellent lunch,**which we were dumb enough to take as an auspicious sign for the rest of our weekend. It was about 1 pm, and we decided to find a cheap motel to stay for the night before heading out to sightsee. There were about a dozen small, ratty motels within sight, so we walked into the closest one. I had barely walked through the front door before the owner started shooing me away.
“Do you have room?” I asked.
“No, we don’t rent to waiguoren.”***
No worries. I’d learned long ago to let apparent prejudices like that slide. The real problem began when the next six or so places reacted in exactly the same way, making it very clear we were not wanted. When asked where we could stay, they all replied, “Chengde Dasha.” This was apparently the only place in town foreigners were allowed to stay, for reasons which were hard to discern.****
It went on like this for about an hour. I’d walk into a place, ignore the owner’s violent shooing gestures, and ask about rooms. The owner would spit something about “No waiguoren,” and I’d move on.
We tried another place. We found the boss passed out in a drunken stupor on the couch. I woke him up and asked if he had room.
“Sure, we’ve got room. How many you need?”
“Two, please. How much? He quoted us a reasonable price. “Can we take a look?
He grabbed the keys and staggered up the stairs with a guardedly optimistic me in tow, opening the door to a sparse but apparently roach-free room. This will work, I said. He lurched back down the stairs to his desk and started to scrawl out the paperwork. I allowed myself to breathe easy, in the belief that our hotel woes were finally coming to an end.
“Okay, I just need to see your national ID cards,” the boss slurred.
“Our what?”
“Your citizenship cards. Like this one.” He helpfully pulled out his national ID card.
“We don’t have citizenship cards. Just passports.”
“Oh, you’re not Chinese citizens? Go to Dasha. We don’t rent to waiguoren,” he said, passing back out on the couch before I could even attempt to offer a proper bribe. Not one person in our party looked even vaguely Asian.
We finally made out way to Dasha. We walked in to an airy, marble floored lobby with chandeliers, a considerable step up from the places we’d been inquiring at. The receptionist greeted us in English.
“How much for a room?” I asked.
“550 yuan for a double,” she said.
“And that’s your cheapest?”
“Yes.”
“Are there any more affordable options in this town?”
“You can try that way…” she replied. “They may not be able to rent to waiguoren, though.” Just fork over the cash now, buddy, her voice implied.
“Well, we can’t afford 550, so we’re going to try somewhere else. Why does your city have this policy?” I asked.
“It’s like this. Chengde doesn’t see many foreign tourists, so we don’t have many hotels that are suitable for waiguoren.” I didn’t bother asking how one would define a hotel considered “suitable” for the 5 billion or so of us who are not Chinese, or pointing out that this didn’t really answer my question at all.
At that point we said screw it, and decided to get in some touristy stuff. We made our way to the Puning Temple, which as I mentioned above was lovely, save for the 80 kuai entrance fee. “Seriously, who do these people think they are?” said my travel companion. This summed up our thoughts on Chengde rather succinctly, I dare say. Nevertheless, we enjoyed some sightseeing, followed by some hiking near Sledgehammer rock (another 50 kuai).
Following our sightseeing respite, we tried a few more hotels. All failures. The sun was now setting, and we were becoming desperate. I walked into a chengguan station to see if the local Paul Blart brigade could take enough time out of their busy schedule of ripping down used air-conditioner advertisements and accidentally beating pedicab drivers to death to shed some light on the situation. Unsurprisingly, they could not.
“Stay at Dasha,” said the slovenly dressed chengguan at the front desk. “The facilities are very suitable for waiguoren.”
“We can’t afford Dasha, we’re poor students,” I replied.
“Hmmm…Just walk that way. Yes, there are many hotels that way,” he said, pointing off to some vague spot in the distance, and clearly just wanting me to go away so he could get back to doing whatever it is chengguan do when they’re not harassing street peddlers. I persisted, asking why exactly we weren’t allowed to stay at the vast majority of hotels in the city, even some which were quite nice.
“Those places aren’t safe…” pseudo-cop replied. There was an awkward pause. ”You’re waiguoren!” he reminded us helpfully.
We tried yet another hole in the wall place. Rejected.
“Where in this city can we stay?” I asked.
“Dasha,” the surly old owner replied.
“We can’t afford Dasha!”
I was met with a blank stare. A crowd of smiling bystanders had formed around us. “Look at the waiguoren speaking Chinese!” giggled one.
I began to get angry. “Don’t you realize how harmful this policy is to your local economy? Your city is nice, but do you think anyone is going to want to come here when you have this policy? What’s wrong with your local government? How stupid can they be?!” I looked around to see the previously smiling crowd had gone silent, and were now apprehensively gazing at their feet, looking all the world like they would rather be anywhere but on that street corner with this recklessly loose-lipped foreigner. One by one, they began to shuffle away uncomfortably. The motel owner’s face changed from passive to worried, her eyes darting up and down the street. It occurred to me I may have crossed the line, and, silly as this may sound, for the first time ever in my year and a half here did I become acutely aware that I was living in an authoritarian state. Of course, I had always been aware of it from an academic standpoint, and even from a practical standpoint, with such small bits of day-to-day mafan like having to register at the police station. But never before, save perhaps for my time in Xinjiang, had I seen the effects of an authoritarian government on the psyches of its people so clearly as on the face of that motel owner. What was the point in complaining? I realized. What’s this woman going to do, write her city councilman? This is the way it is, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
I then realized that the local government officials who formed this policy weren’t idiots at all. Their goal was never to encourage healthy long-term economic growth through tourism in the first place; it was to enrich themselves as much as possible, small-time motel owners like the woman in front of me be damned. This was politics of the bottom line, and nothing more. What incentive do they have to spread prosperity, so long as the owners of Dasha continue cutting them a paycheck to maintain the status quo? They had nothing to fear; at the end of the day, their bowls of shark’s fin soup would continue to runneth over, and all would be right with the world.
Dejected, we resolved to leave this city that would not have us that very night and never return. One problem: there were no train tickets. Or bus tickets. We couldn’t stay, but Chengde wouldn’t seem to let us leave, either. The only way out was with the illegal cab drivers, who seemed to be able to smell our despair like a shark does blood. They struck.
“80 per person!” said one.
“100 per person, but I’ll get you there in two hours!” said another. “It’s only more expensive because you’ll have to pay for my speeding ticket,” he added. Jesus, will we have to bail you out of jail too? I thought.*****
We ended up negotiating the price down to 50 per person (and then had to specify we meant RMB, not USD, thank you kindly). A random man came up to us and began talking in broken English about how these are bad men, and its dangerous to go with them. Two of our travel companions had only been in China for a short time, and this only further frayed their nerves. I regaled them with the story of the driver we’d hired off the street in Xinjiang who’d waited until we were well into the desert to inform us he’d just gotten out of jail for murder. This didn’t help things. I couldn’t help but reflect on the irony of the chengguan earlier today telling me that we couldn’t stay in any of the hotels in town because they weren’t safe, when this only lead to us being put in a considerably sketchier position. Luckily, the illegal cab ride turned out to be the most mundane part of our trip, and we pulled in to Beijing around 1 am. To paraphrase Arrested Development patriarch George Bluth, “And that’s why…ya don’t go to Chengde.”
Matt Bruzzese is a translator/token white guy for a Chinese computer company and wannabe freelance writer who has published three blogs at various points in his life, each of which have exactly one entry.
*Not to be confused with Chengdu; one is known for its pandas and unfortunate fault line location, the other for its Qing-era Summer Palace and a comically phallic rock formation. We went to the latter.
** Seriously, if you ever happen to find yourself in Chengde, first of all, sorry, but secondly, go to the Dongpo Restaurant outside the train station. It’s phenomenal.
*** Foreigners.
****We got conflicting reports on the actual reason, everything from, “we don’t have the proper license,” to “we’re not sure how to fill out the paperwork.”
***** We rejected this guy on the grounds that we would rather get there two hours later, but alive. This fact seemed to be lost on him, as he continued to make the “Me: fast! Them: slow!” pitch from the sidelines.
 We're at the Great Wall this weekend...not for the first time to be sure. Here's a photo of me and "The Mighty Ho" hiking the wall between Jinshanling and Simatai in the summer of 2002. (If you blow up the picture you'll see the TMH is keeping hydrated with a lukewarm can of Yanjing.)
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