I’m amused by the annual Ayi exodus.  Since it’s rare to see a Beijing expat lift anything heavier than money, this seasonal retreat of our nannies, waitresses, cooks, cleaners, drivers, dry cleaners, convenience store owners, and jianbing purveyors is a useful exercise in deprivation and self-reliance…like an outward bound experience for the neo-colonialist in all of us.

I really enjoy temple fairs.  I think of it as a way to spread wealth.  Two years ago I had my wallet nicked. Last year somebody managed to walk away with YJ’s cell phone.  I’m taking my students to Ditan Park next Wednesday.  If anybody is looking for a used iPod, blackberry, or expensive camera, check the local pawnshops in the Beixinqiao area on Thursday morning.

I love the gala.  The gambling possibilities are limitless.  Currently I have 50 RMB on the Over/Under for “first sighting of happy dancing Han dressed as minorities singing about how much they love the Party” and “Number of Dashan wannabe foreign minstrel acts.”[1]  I also have a three-way teaser on a Song Zuying song + Jiang Zemin sighting + shot of Mrs. Jiang Zemin looking like she really wants to crack one of Jiang’s nuts in a hydraulic press.

I’m disappointed Zhao Benshan won’t be performing. Never figured the guy to ‘retire.’ I guess I had always hoped he would go out in a blaze of glory, one final performance busting out blue jokes sufficient to make a Shenzhen hooker sit up and take notes while mooning the CCTV censors with a man-sized ass.  Pity, really.

I like that my in-laws live in Tianjin.  While I enjoy friends talking about the travails of journeying to remote county towns in farthest Dongbei or a 45-hour train ride to Guangdong to take part in family bonding, I prefer staying closer to home.  Actually, I’m so congenitally lazy I’ve finally worked out a scheme whereby Tianjin comes to Beijing thus sparing me the ‘effort’ of a 35-minute train ride.  To be fair our apartment is a little bit more guest convenient than where we stay in Tianjin, but my mother-in-law laments that Beijing is quite boring during the Spring Festival.  To make her feel at home this year I’ve hired a few mercs from Blackwater Security to shoot RPGs and random bursts of gunfire off our rooftop at midnight on Sunday.  It should up the explosion quotient but if that doesn’t work, I’ll simply put an unopened can of soup and a bottle of ergoutou in the microwave and press “start.”

Actually, as longtime readers of my blog know I seriously lucked out in the Chinese In-Law Lotto. My father-in-law neither smokes nor drinks which means that I don’t need to ring in this year by sacrificing future years through participation in quaint customs like “tobacco-as-testosterone,” “toasting-with-jet-fuel” and my favorite, “drinking-to-the-point-of-delirium-before-going-outside-with-sufficient-explosives-to-end-the-Taliban-and-lighting-them-with-the-cigarettes-dangling-from-our-mouths.”  My mother-in-law is an incredible cook, and her ability to dote on my wife to the point of psychological scarring should someday find its way into a textbook.

Perhaps the mystery of Spring Festival will always elude me, but at least I can enjoy it as a time to catch up one work, fulfill my jiaozi quota for the quarter, and write snarky blog posts about the holiday season while pretending to work on my laptop.

Happy Year of the Dragon!

There were always going to be challenges, and the fractious nature of Chinese society meant knitting together a nation based on a shared commitment to republican ideals would be a herculean task, but Sun had help.  The young organizer Song Jiaoren, a trusted lieutenant of Sun’s, worked tirelessly to build a national party capable of winning a majority in the yet-to-be-seated national assembly.  Unfortunately, Song was assassinated less than a year later by agents of Yuan Shikai.  Yuan then dissolved parliament, outlawed opposition parties, and watched a “Second Revolution” launched by Sun in 1913 founder and fizzle.  After Yuan’s death in 1916, what was left of central authority crumbled and the old Qing Empire became a failed state, a patchwork of warlords and occupying powers.

Sun and others argued that the political consciousness of China’s people was too limited to support the kind of popular participation required in a republican government.  Sentiments still echoed today.  Most recently, Han Han, the Justin Bieber of China’s literary world, posted a series of provocative essays conceding that even a century later, Sun’s assessment of the political potential of China’s populace was essentially nil.

A term which gets thrown around a lot is “suzhi” 素质, an amorphous term which captures everything from somebody’s education and manners to slightly more insidious connotations of heredity and ‘essential quality.’

Frankly, I find the argument that Chinese people are “too base” for democracy a little dismissive and patronizing.  But while it can be tiresome when my urban middle-class Chinese friends resort to the “suzhi” argument, I have little patience for foreign ‘friends’ of China playing the same card.  When well-heeled urban Chinese make this argument, it’s asinine and classist, but when trotted out by non-Chinese commentators, most of whom grew up with a full complement of civil liberties and legal protections, it comes across as not a little bit racist as well.

100 years ago, Sun famously compared Chinese society to a heap of loose sand, 400 million individuals who needed to be awakened so as to play a part in the forging of a new nation based on republican principles and rule of law.  A century later, Sun’s vision has come true – if not for China as a whole – than at least for the people of Taiwan.  Whatever can be said for the ‘suitability’ of democracy as a political system, in China or elsewhere, at least we can stop the lame excuses of ‘national condition’ or ‘cultural compatibility’ and other worn out essentialist pseudo-arguments.

High-Heels Girl: She’s 5’2 but insists on toddling around in 6” spiked heels like a rum-soaked hooker. God forbid you end up behind her approaching either stairs or an escalator.  How these women avoid a mass epidemic of high ankle fractures is a Chinese mystery akin to Panda libido and Hu Jintao’s actual hair color.  Personally, I don’t blame these girls as much as I blame idiot HR practices in Beijing requiring your receptionist be taller than 1.6 meters to answer a telephone.

Loud Laowai Guy: Dude, they can hear you. You’ve seen this guy, almost always in a group, pontificating loudly in English about the people right next to him as if they have no idea what he’s saying.  Yo, Frat Boy…even though the only Chinese words YOU may know are “pijiu” and “chuanr” you might want to remember that many of your fellow passengers have been studying English from the time they could eat solid food.  The only reason they’re not telling you to shut your piehole is because they are too busy contemplating the grammatical and syntax implications of calling you a ‘douchebag’ versus a ‘douchenozzle.’

The Meandering Messengers: You can spot Meandering Messengers from across the platform, heads down, tapping, careening into their fellow commuters like hyperactive loose electrons.  When trying to get from point A to point B (for example during the approximately 20-mile walk required to switch lines at the Xizhimen Subway stop) nothing will gum up the works faster than two or three Meanderers whipping out their phones and switching from normal forward progress to a semi-synchronized half-speed lobotomized lurch.  They’re also impossible to get off the bottom of your shoe should you happen to step on one accidentally.

Aggressive Seat Guy: Some might argue that this character shouldn’t be gender specific, but I have an easier time being jostled by Grandma and her cane needing a seat than by some young angry dude shoving people out of the way before the doors even fully open.  I know the subways are crowded, and having a seat can make a long ride much more pleasant, but it’s a seat on the subway not the last plane out of Saigon.  Going full aggro in pursuit of a place to put your ass for five minutes just seems weird and angry.

Door Stuffers: They work in tandem, usually holding hands, sometimes wearing matching outfits.  They rush into the car and…stop. Right where they are. Right in the middle of the door.  It doesn’t matter if they’re going one stop or five, they ensconce themselves in the middle of the only available entrance and exit and do everything except build a nest made of twigs, leaves, and their own saliva.  The only real fun is when this species’ natural enemy, Aggro Seat Guy (see above), comes barreling in at full speed causing the female Stuffer to squawk hysterically while her mate makes useless threat gestures with his appendages and throat.  Always high comedy.

Enjoy your commute.

Philip A. Kuhn. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Published in 1990, this is the oldest book on the list, but remains a brilliant example of following a single – seemingly random – skein through the archives. Kuhn tugs the thread, and the political and social fabric of the era historians still refer to as the “High Qing” slowly starts to unravel page after page.  Despite its reputation as a golden age in Chinese history, it soon becomes clear that all was not well in the empire during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor.  The creeping calcification of the bureaucracy meant the government struggled to keep pace with an increasingly complex and mobile society, an ominous foreshadowing of the problems to come in China’s disastrous 19^th century.  The case in question starts as a simple incident of local mischief – the clipping of men’s braids/queues ostensibly for use by sorcerers – but the affair so shocked the increasingly paranoid Qianlong emperor that he engineered his own investigation, simultaneously trying to root out heterodox groups in Qing society while also hoping to shake his officials out of their complacency.  Kuhn’s masterwork is an incredible, and highly readable, look at Qing society just as things started to turn for the worse.[1]

If you like this, next read Jonathan Spence, Treason by the Book

Susan Mann. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Writing a history of China with women at the center of the story is as daunting an undertaking as there is in the profession, but in crafting this book, Susan Mann combines superior research skills with an elegantly written narrative to create a wonderful work of historical scholarship.  So much of what we think we know about the historical Chinese woman is a product of May 4^th-era reformers seeking to condemn the old as backwards and feudal (Look! See how they treated their women!) or finger-wagging corseted foreign missionaries bewailing their poor benighted bound foot Chinese sisters.  In this absolute classic, Mann deconstructs the gaze of the (mostly) male writers of the time to ask, “Did women have a high Qing?” With a distinct nod to the work of historians like Joan Kelly and Joan Scott, Mann looks at how the Qing state (and orthodoxy) attempted to reconcile the feminine ideal of demure submission with a reality — at least among elite women — of talented writers whose brushes and stories stretched the bounds of what was expected for woman of the age.  In particular, Mann’s brilliant and nuanced readings of the women’s own poetry provide a fascinating counterpoint to those sources about women but written by men.

If you like this, next read Susan Mann, Talented Women of the Zhang Family

Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Pomeranz throws out the old 20^th-century question of “Why did China fail to modernize” and instead sets out to prove that in 1800 both Europe and China faced a similar set of ecological limitations which could only be broken through the application of new technology.  The industrial revolution which allowed European nations and their satellites to transform resources into economic and military power happened first in Europe not because Europeans were smarter or more advanced, but because historical contingency gave Western Europe a few key fortuitous advantages (namely, easily accessible coal to power the machines of industry and colonies which could provide cheap raw materials and ready markets) that helped to sustain the industrial revolution once it started.  It’s a provocative thesis, challenged by many, but Pomeranz presents a solid economic and historical argument in a highly-accessible and thoughtful book.

If you like this, next read R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience

Paul A. Cohen. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

As much a book about history as it is a history book, Paul Cohen takes a (reasonably) well-known story – that of the Boxer Uprising of 1900 – and uses it to show how a single event can look very different when approached first as a straight narrative (the historian as story teller) then as experience (not just what happened but how it mattered to the people who lived it) and then myth (how the event is imagined and remembered long after the fact).  The second section – on experience – in particular stands out for its historical artistry as Cohen weaves the story of the Boxers with those of other peoples to show both the unique and the universal of the Boxers’ experience.  It was one of the first books I read in graduate school and is still a favorite of mine.  Not just a good history, but a book that will change your view of how history is lived, written, read, and remembered.

If you like this, next read Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China

Jonathan D. Spence. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Yes, it’s Jonathan Spence and yes, Spence does write the whole book in the ‘present tense’ style popularized by the talking heads in Ken Burns’ documentaries (“And so, there was Grant…up on the hill looking down…and Grant knew that if he pushed on, disaster would be the result…”) but it’s also a cracking good read.  I know people get on Spence as a novelist posing as a historian, but the man can write and he’s a far more innovative researcher than people give him credit.  If you like your history served up with a storyteller’s flair for vivid descriptions, well-rounded characters, and the odd plot twist (and, in fairness, you don’t mind the occasional liberty with the historical record) then you’ll love this book.  It helps too that Hong Xiuquan, the failed scholar who decided that as the younger brother of Jesus Christ he might as well bring down the Qing Empire, happens to be one of those grandiose historical mad men whose story needs very little in the way of embellishment.

If you like this, next read Jonathan Spence, Kangxi: Portrait of an Emperor (In which Spence goes full on hubris and writes the story of the Kangxi Emperor – in the first person as Kangxi.)