Jottings from the Granite Studio

It’s that time of the year.  Or decade.  Or something.  The stars have finally aligned and YJ and I actually have time off at the same time,* so we’re packing our bags and heading to the birthplace of Chairman Mao, Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, and really freaking spicy food…Hunan.  No offense to Hunan’s most famous fat kid, but we’re going to bypass the Commie kitsch-fest in Shaoshan and instead go backpacking in the western part of the province, visiting the villages of Fenghuang and Dehang (mind the tour bus full of shouting, matching-cap wearing tourists on your right…) and the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park.

There may be a couple of places where I can get online, but I’m not planning on doing any posting until we get back on July 6.  Until then, hope your summer is treating you well and Go Sox!

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*In the last 18 months, we’ve canceled two vacations at the very last minute.  One because YJ had a story come up and the second because I needed to keep momentum going on dissertation research.  The last actual ‘family’ vacation we took was Thailand in 2007, and that little trip would probably more accurately be described as “honeymoon.”

The (increasingly nervous) supreme leader of Iran speaking on the demonstrations this week in his country:

The ayatollah reached beyond Iran to criticize “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for seeking to portray Iran as divided and accused what he called arrogant Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, of hostile comments, saying they failed to understand Iranian society.

Change a couple of words around and this could be your average moronic fenqing comment on any number of China blogs…

A word on rhetoric for my young FQ friends…mind a bit whose words your own resemble, it says a lot about the quality of thought behind them.

Now some teachers will write about their students, sharing odd or quizzical bits from papers and exams for the sake of humor.  I wouldn’t do that to my students, but OTHER people’s students…sure, why not?

From an op-ed on China and North Korea in Student Newspaper from the University of Southern State, USA*:

The Chinese mentality is nothing new. If one delves deep into the history books, they can find that the Chinese have possessed such a thought process since their earliest days. They were, and remain, “The Middle Kingdom” or “The Central Nation.” (In fairness, the Europeans have often thought of themselves as “The Middle Earth,” but they at least have the geography to back it up.)

Ok, I’m not a Europeanist, but has anyone not named J.R.R. Tolkien ever used the term “Middle Earth” when thinking of Europe?  And exactly what kind of maps do they use at this school to geographically “back up” Europe’s location in the middle of the earth?  (I’m not even going to get into the whole “let’s read WAY too much into the ‘Middle Kingdom’ translation of Zhongguo,” more experienced journalists than this kid have made the same mistake.)

Since the rise of Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic in 1949, the ambition and pride has been melded with secrecy and authoritarianism.

Well, Mao rose to power beginning in about 1928 or 1935 or the 1940s (it was a bumpy road) but yeah, secrecy, authoritarianism, and a decent braised pork were pretty much the secret of the Chairman’s success.

China is a country that remains in denial about its murderous rampage two decades ago at Beijing’s Tianenmen Square.

Other than the odd mix of Wade-Giles and pinyin, the kid has it mostly right.  Except that “China” did not go on a murderous rampage in Tiananmen Square or Beijing. The PLA, under orders from the CCP leadership, opened fire on the Chinese people.  That’s why it’s tricky to use countries as subject nouns.

China is a country that continues to actively persecute religious orders, including Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism.

Overlooking that Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism aren’t “religious orders” but religions, it’s only half true that the CCP persecutes followers of either faith.  That is, they persecute the half that follows the wrong guy.  You can be Catholic in China, just not ultimately loyal to the Pope.  You can be a Tibetan Buddhist, but it’s probably not a wise idea to decorate your home in Dalai Lama paraphenalia.

China is a country that is constantly attempting to assert its power in a negative way. The detention of an American naval crew in 2001 — after a Chinese fighter jet rammed the American surveillance plane in international airspace — was but one example of Beijing trying to execute a power play.

Ah, the hyperbole of youth.  Name a country that asserts its power in a positive way 100% of the time?  Norway? In any case, it’s probably a stretch to think that the PLA had one of their pilots pull an airborne Nathan Hale for the sole purpose of playing five on four hockey for two minutes.

Now the purpose of this isn’t to mock the student op-ed editors (okay, maybe just a little).  But the attitude and ideas in this student editorial are actually pretty representative of a general public perception of China, especially among conservatives.  It’s easy for academics or journalists living and working in Beijing to forget how little your average American really knows about China, and this lack of information can lead to all kinds of misunderstandings.

Every semester, a new group of students arrives at our center here in Beijing, and one of the joys of teaching is helping students understand the nuance and complexities of China, challenging misconceptions, and offering guidance as the students experience a new country and culture.

Paraphrasing a cliche used for everything from preaching to print journalism, I see the job of a history teacher as “answering questions and questioning answers.” It’s about not letting students become too comfortable in certainties, but rather able to keep their minds open to all the possible ways of understanding the past.  I tell ya, It’s a helluva way to make a living and I wouldn’t trade it for a single thing.

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*My goal is not to single out one student or university, but if you really must know which school it was, click here for the full editorial.

California Assemblyman Paul Fong (D – Mountain View) is seeking federal reparations for the discrimination suffered by Chinese immigrants coming to the United States in the 19th and early 20th century.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Mountain View, wants us to remember that when the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor in 1886, welcoming immigrants from around the world to America, there should have been a sign posted in front that said: “Everyone except Chinese.”

Just four years earlier, at the urging of Californians, Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, for the first time barring entry to a group of immigrants strictly based on their national origin.

“Chinese people were singled out,” he said. “They couldn’t be citizens, they couldn’t hold jobs. They couldn’t own property.”

The law was repealed in 1943, and in most parts of the country it was forgotten. Growing up in the Midwest, I vaguely remember reading in my U.S. history book about “yellow peril” but knew little about the suffering of Chinese immigrants and their families. Of course, that same history book didn’t mention the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, either.

But Fong wants us to remember. And he wants us to apologize.

Fong has it right, this is a chapter in US history that too often gets overlooked.  The massive disruptions in the 19th century caused many Chinese to seek their fortunes overseas.  Chinese immigrants built railroads, worked on mines, started businesses, and formed communities throughout the world, including in the North American west.  They also suffered discrimination, were subjected to violent attacks and lynchings, and faced a number of laws designed to restrict immigration and force Chinese and other Asians into residential and occupational ghettos.

Along with the African slavery, the wars of extermination carried out against the Native Americans, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the treatment of Chinese-Americans during the formative years of the United States needs to be addressed, and I applaud Paul Fong for his efforts.

I’m not a tech guy, but I despise state-sponsored censorship, so I’ve been following the epic fail of the Green Dam software with a certain admitted sense of schadenfreude.  The whole thing has been a disaster from the start which is rather amazing given the usual attention Chinese state-owned companies pay to such things as “innovation,” “product quality,” and “transparency.”

Nevertheless, it took Associate Professor J. Alex Halderman and a team of students from the University of Michigan approximately 12 hours to uncover a dizzying array of security vulnerabilities and programming errors.

The full report is available online.  Allow me to summarize:  The sloppy programming job on this piece of crap software means that if it is installed, you’ll leave your computer more open to exploitation then a group of sorority sisters when the Girls Gone Wild Spring Break crew crashes “Free Tequila for Tiny Tops” night in Cancun.

On top of that, it’s one thing to screw something up on your own…it takes real genius to CHEAT and STILL screw it up.

“Halderman and his team discovered evidence that Solid Oak Software code may have been lifted and placed in Green Dam. It wasn’t just that “blacklisted” URL addresses appeared to be copied directly from Cybersitter; “a news item, almost like a press release that Cybersitter sent to customers was included in the shipping version of Green Dam software,” Halderman said. “It appeared to be copied into Green Dam by mistake.”

It reminds me of a speech I once attended by the well-known educator Jaime Escalante (Stand and Deliver) who began the evening with this anecdote:

“One class I had two students: Johnny and Jimmy.  They sat next to each other and as I was grading the first test, I began to suspect they were cheating.  So I called their parents in to the school for a conference.  They all denied their sons had cheated, so I put the papers on the desk to compare them.

Question 1: Johnny was right.  Jimmy was right.

Question 2: Johnny was wrong. Jimmy also wrong.

Jimmy’s father said, ‘That doesn’t prove anything.”

You are right sir, but on question three, Johnny wrote ‘I don’t know’ and Jimmy wrote ‘Me neither.’

Ladies and Gentleman, Yoooourrrrr Green Dam software team.

This is either an online photographic archive documenting an interesting cultural phenomenon which touches on a host of issues worthy of further study and research…or a fetish site.  Could go either way.

(h/t Sinosplice via Adam Schokora via Twitter).

From The People’s Daily Online:

The State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) bought the rare manuscripts of Hu Shi’s letters at the price of 5,544,000 yuan in China Guardian’s 2009 Spring Auction Saturday. It is the first time the State decided to use the preemptive right to buy a cultural relic.

Dozens of letters between New Culture Movement leader Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, Liang Qichao and Xu Zhimo during 1920-30s, totaling 13 letters and 27 pages, are the precious collections of these rare historical documents.

Chen Duxiu’s letter to Hu Shi.

The letters concern the establishment of independent newspaper “New Youth” in 1920, the breakdown of “New Youth” editorial colleagues in 1920, demonstrations and strikes of students in Shanghai in 1920, the participation of Hu Shi in the ‘Aftermath Solution Meeting’ of Duan Qirui’s government, and the publication of Chen Duxiu’s drafts written in prison.

There is no word on where the letters will be stored or what kind of access researchers will have to the documents.  Hu Shi is a fascinating figure in modern Chinese history.

Hu was a key figure in the May Fourth Movement but grew disenchanted with revolution as a force for social change and rejected Marxism.  While Hu ended up on Taiwan, where he founded the Academia Sinica, his intellectual shadow still looms large on the mainland.  Hu’s ideas of historiography, cultural studies, and philosophy in many ways seem more in keeping with the spirit of China today than the radical political agenda of his New Culture era correspondents such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu.

Hopefully, the preservation and study of these documents will add to our knowledge of this fascinating figure and his times.

Another week another column for The Global Times.  (And in case you’re wondering, my soul feels no less decayed than usual.)  This one is on basketball with a little foreign relations thrown in by way of metaphor.  Enjoy.

Work in the sites around the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi has proceeded in fits and starts since the terracotta soldiers were first discovered in 1974.  In recent years, Chinese archaeologists have held at bay local officials eager to develop tourism at all costs, and instead approached further excavation cautiously, seeking to avoid damaging priceless antiquities yet to be uncovered.

Work on the Number One Pit at the excavation site has been halted for over twenty years…until this weekend when a further 200 meters will be uncovered with a CCTV film crew in tow to capture the proceedings.

The initial diggings uncovered over 1,000 terracotta figures, it is hoped by the team that further work might uncover not only soldiers, but also possibly teracotta officers or officials as well.

Via Asian Studies WWW Monitor:

Chinese Ancient Texts (CHANT) Database

Research Centre for Chinese Ancient Texts, Institute of Chinese
Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK, China.

A description of, a guided tour, and online contents of:
* Jiaguwen – A Database of Oracular Inscriptions on Tortoise Shells
and Bones [Database Contents: inscriptions found on 53,834 fragments
of shells and bones - ed.]]
* Jianbao – A Database of the Excavated Wood/Bamboo and Silk Scripts
[Database Contents: Approximately 1.4 million characters from the
entire corpus of all published Jianbo texts - ed.]
* Jinwen – A Database of Bronze Inscriptions – [Database Contents:
Over 140,000 words from 12,021 bronze vessels - ed.]
* Pre-Han & Han – A Database of The Entire Body of Extant Han and
Pre-Han (i.e. pre-220AD) Traditional Chinese Texts.
* Six Dynasties – A Database of Traditional Chinese Texts of Weijin
and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (220-589AD) [Database
Contents: Over 25 millions words from over 1,000 titles - ed.]
* Leishu – A Computerized Database of the Entire Body of Extant
Chinese Encyclopedias (Leishu) [Database Contents: Over 60 million
words from all major Leishu texts from the Weijin period until to the
Qing Dynasty, including Qunshuzhiyao, Taiping Yulan, Cefu Yuangui and
Yongle Dadian - ed.]

[A bi-lingual (CN, EN) website with online databases accessible for a
fee to  individual or institutional subscribers - ed.]

URL http://www.chant.org/