Jottings from the Granite Studio

There seems to be a (I’m guessing not very large, but who knows?) movement afoot to take Mao off of the 100 RMB note and replace him, apropos of this weekend’s festivities, with Qu Yuan.

Aileen McCabe of the Camwest News Service reports:

An open letter, drafted by author Ling Cangzhou and signed by 11 colleagues, says: “We young Chinese scholars look back on the festival’s origins and it’s hard to remain calm as we seek the truth behind a distorted history.”

They argue that traditional Chinese culture that was distorted during the Cultural Revolution by “demented opposition” now risks being hijacked by the “ideology” of power elites.

Legend has it the poet Qu drowned himself in Miluo River in today’s Hunan province in 278 BC. The distraught townspeople and fishermen raced in their boats, first to try to save him and then to sprinkle rice on the water to keep the fish from eating his body before they could recover it.

Current history paints Qu as a patriotic hero who despaired when the Qin state took over his homeland, a view the academics find hard to swallow.

“We do not deny that Qu Yuan had a patriotic side, but we believe that another side, his desire for freedom and his refusal to submit to tyranny, has been obscured and diluted.”

They add: “Chinese history is nothing like how it is described by the power-monopolized historical outlook, one moment dirt-black, the next incomparably wonderful.”

(A full translation of the letter can be found here courtesy of Danwei’s Joel Martinson)

It’s an interesting argument and it’s indicative of a shift in historical research and analysis that began in the 1980s to reevaluate China’s pre-1949 history. In the bad old days, such analysis was easy: Before liberation China was a feudal society and then a semi-feudal/semi-colonial society in which the people were oppressed by an avaricious upper class and, later, a rapacious set of foreign powers, the only possible salvation being a socialist revolution under the glorious leadership of the Great Helmsman Mao Zedong. QED.

It was a lesson learned too well: during the Cultural Revolution relics of China’s past, including priceless works of art and architecture, were destroyed by the thousands.

Things are different today, to an extent. There’s considerable popular interest in China’s pre-1949 history, and most people I talk to take great pride in their country’s ancient past. But while the wholesale rejection of the past is now its own kind of relic, history, especially history education, in China is still based on a teleological narrative. Even though the theoretical reductionism of Marxist historiography has been jettisoned and key historical figures (such as Zeng Guofan) rehabilitated, events of the past are too often shoehorned into a narrative from which there can only be one possible outcome: the revolutionary liberation and subsequent development of China under the sole leadership of the Communist Party. Alternative histories need not apply.

I’m not sure how far the request to take Mao off of the currency will go. (I suspect about as far as my idea to replace the Mao painting hanging on Tiananmen during the Olympics with a picture of the Chairman in toga and laurel wreath.) But I like the way these guys are thinking.

Anyway, Happy Duan Wu Jie!