1. The “Confucius Peace Prize” award ceremony turned into such a debacle of such high unintentional comedy that the relevant propaganda organs are right now tripping over themselves to disown the whole stupid idea. In other news, the strategy of “locking a lot of people up” is — unbelievably — not taking the focus off of China’s human right’s record. Suffice it to say, MOFA spokeswoman Jiang Yu probably wishes she had decided to call in sick today. On the plus side, former spokesgeek Qin Gang would have probably started crying on the podium so…kind of a win.
2. Yajun was at the press conference for the Confucius Prize this afternoon and she told me that she actually started to feel bad for some members of the “committee” who clearly had no idea what they had signed up and that the ringleader of the whole circus,Tan Changliu, is totally fucking nuts in a kind of “check his refrigerator for human organs” kind of way.
3. It’s the end of the semester and I am 19 papers away from locking myself in closet with 50 boxes of ramen noodles and a case of Four Loko not to emerge again until I’ve written another 50 pages of dissertation.
4. It’s my students’ last night in Beijing. If you’re in the Wudaokou area tonight, you’ve been warned.
5. We’re spending Christmas in Beijing (See #3). Plastic tree, Christmas duck, and then Sanya for four days followed by a visa run to Hong Kong. Happy freaking holidays.
6. More on Confucius…a really good essay by a scholar I admire and one by somebody who seems to confuse “serious scholarship” with “being a shill for the Party.” For the record, the “Confucian Values” deployed by the Party and its hacks in today’s China has little to do with the Confucianism of the imperial era (never mind of Confucius’ time). Rather it’s a barely re-warmed pablum of authoritarian traditionalism more akin to Chiang Kai-shek’s ill-conceived New Life Movement of the 1930s.
7. Did I mention, Carl Crawford is now a member of the Red Sox? And Adrian Gonzalez? I don’t care if we had to become New York Yankees North to do it, I’m looking forward to next season.
8. Teaching 20th century China next quarter. Get ready for lots of “Mao more than ever” jokes.
9. 30 years since John Lennon was killed at the age of 40. Just saying.
Great post – except for the Red Sox nonsense. Thanks especially for the link to the IBT article. That’s the first sign I’ve seen of internal dissent re: the Confucius prize.
‘totally fucking nuts in a kind of “check his refrigerator for human organs” kind of way,’ hahaha yikes! back at YJ.
Must dig out MY plastic tree. Bless Carrefour for 19¥ trees.
love your blog. learn a lot about china from it. but you better go finish that diss, man.
Have to agree on Confucius – it especially annoys me when I hear people describe East Asian societies as ‘Confucian’ and hence automatically deferential to authority or whatever. The fact that most western countries are/were ‘Christian’ has not prevented the teachings of Christ from being interpreted to support a whole range of political systems, from the anarchic to the dictatorial – and this despite the fact that, unlike Confucianism, Christian doctrine is controlled by centralising authorities like the Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox churches.
Understanding Confucianism will not help you much (or at all) in understanding the resignation of Yukio Hatoyama, the rise of K-pop girl bands like the Wonder Girls, the failure of the Taiwanese baseball team in the 2008 Olympics, the scandal surrounding the demolition of the Star Ferry piers in Hong Kong, Vietnam’s role in the Spratly islands dispute, or, indeed, the threats made by the CCP against countries which send delegations to the Nobel Prize award. Pretending that all these things can be understood primarily from the fact that these societies are ‘Confucian’, rather than on the basis of the modern histories of the respective countries, is a pure fallacy which can be immediately dismissed.
Using ‘Confucian’ as a lazy short-hand for ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’ does not make whatever mystifying ‘We/they are different, just look at this Confucius quote!’ commentary that follows any more convincing.
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i thought confucianism was also exquisitely malleable…. chameleonlike in its transformations through the years.
Nice contrast of the two Confucian pieces….but I have to ask..you’ve taken a couple of shots over the years at CJK’s New Life Movement. What exactly is it that gets to you?
Potato Potato,
Sure, but like all living faiths it can also be cynically coopted by powerful interests and repackaged as “Harmony” or “New Life” or other forms of ideological justifications for authoritarianism. It’s the difference between a chicken and KFC.
Jon,
Yeah…it’s hard to find somebody who will say good things about the New Life Movement. It was one part “Confucianism” two parts European-style Fascism, mix and serve. You had your Blue Shirts, your civic morality campaigns, all created to build an ideological bulwark for a Nationalist regime increasingly bereft of ideology inducements beyond “We’re not the CCP and we’re not Japanese.” I think I’ve take so many shots at it also because of how eerily similar some aspects of recent “Civilization” and “Harmonious Society” campaigns echo the New Life Campaigns of the 1930s, right down to the same focus on relatively minor details like clothing, spitting, and soup slurping.