Students in my Late Imperial China class are familiar with Shen Fu, the writer and artist who wrote “Six Records” about a life of financial hardship, troublesome family, his loving relationship with his talented and dutiful wife Yun, and some of the indignities of trying to cling to elite status in the increasingly complex society of late 18th/early 19th-century China. The problem though is that of the six records, only four are extant…until now, and will wonders never cease, it just so happens that Shen Fu turns out to be an expert witness in the ongoing debate between China and Japan over the status of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.
From China.org/China Daily:
A hand-written document believed to be of a missing part of a Chinese literary work which showed the Diaoyu Islands as being part of China, was auctioned for 13.25 million yuan (2 million U.S.dollars) Monday in Beijing.
The item was hand-written by Qian Meixi, a calligrapher in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). It is believed to be a copy of the fifth chapter of “the Six Chapters of a Floating Life” of Shen Fu, a writer and painter also from the Qing Dynasty.
This island chain, once a tributary of
In a commentary in the Financial Times today, Asia Editor David Pilling argues that the current Sino-Japanese island dispute is difficult to settle historically, because both sides wish to apply current notions of sovereignty to a time before the rise of the modern nation-state.
Pilling writes:
I offer no opinion as to whose legal claim is stronger. But I suspect that something deeper is at stake. Before westerners brought their guns and opium to east Asia, the idea of a nation state was not well established. “Back then, people didn’t really have the concept of sovereignty, rather there was suzerainty,” says Min Gyo Koo, an expert in international affairs in Seoul. China was self-evidently the dominant civilisation, he says. As such, it collected tribute from surrounding kingdoms, such as Ryukyu, which later became known as Okinawa when it was annexed by Japan.
Jonathan Fenby, a historian of China, puts imperial China’s likely relationship with the Senkaku/ Diaoyu islands thus: “Things like exercising practical sovereignty over a rocky island didn’t matter. So long as people recognised the innate superiority of the Chinese system, that was enough.”
It’s an important point because trying to base contemporary claims on the past can be
This is a longish post…
A long time ago, self-congratulatory citizens and academics of Western Europe and the United States would explain the ludicrous assault on Qing Imperial sovereignty in the 19th century as the simple and sad story of the emperor who said no. Poor deluded Qianlong missed an opportunity to liberalize his trade policies and join the ‘comity of nations’ when he dismissed the noble, upstanding diplomat MacCartney with a sniff, a wave, and a haughty letter to His Royal Majesty King George III which boasted that, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.”
Of course this narrative was a poppycock fairy tale to justify the armed expansion of trading and other privileges by the North Atlantic powers in the 19th century.
The Qianlong Emperor wasn’t declaring a new policy, rather he was describing an economic reality: The Qing Empire at the end of the 18th century was a continent-sized trading network of markets and hubs, mines, farms, plantations, factories, merchants, banks, guilds, and relatively sophisticated systems of finance and
150 years ago this month, troops from an Anglo-French expedition torched the imperial gardens located in Northwest Beijing. The multiplicity of meanings associated with the site and the complicated circumstances of its destruction make for fascinating history as well as an opportunity for the CCP’s educational minions to leech that history of any real substance — other than as a crude device to teach ‘patriotism.’
Author, scholar, and fellow IES faculty member Sheila Melvin has a great piece in last week’s New York Times discussing the history of the Yuanmingyuan. She writes:
On the low end of the scale was a free performance called “The Legend of Yuanmingyuan,” which was held weekend evenings on the Yuanmingyuan grounds last summer. Staged by the Beijing Dragon in the Sky Shadow Puppet Troupe and considered “patriotic education” for children, the show alternated shadow puppets and costumed dwarfs in a reenactment that saw invading troops bravely staved off by local villagers using kung fu and bayonets. Foreigners — played by dwarfs wearing curly yellow-wool wigs — were depicted as venal and stupid barbarians who could not even speak their own languages. Eager to aid the emperor, the brave Chinese villagers repeatedly shouted, “Kill the foreign
Crazy Thursday…class at 1:30 (where I previewed my latest CD “The Entire Chinese Revolution in 90 Easy Minutes”) and then a day of dealing with one of those student issues that make you regret becoming an administrator as opposed to just a humble (but much poorer) history teacher. On top of that I’m crashing a deadline for a book review. Nevertheless, China marches on and there’s no shortage of hijinks and crazy links even on a Thursday such as this.
Lest anyone forget, today is the designated day to remember the founding of the Communist Party back on July 23, 1921. Why do we celebrate it on July 1? Yeah, I don’t know either. I also managed to write nearly 2000 words yesterday about the Opium War and forgot to mention that July 1 is the anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to the PRC. Whoops.
The Wall Street Journal China Real Time Report links to a post by a “senior official at the China Academy of Social Sciences” who has a new plan to solve China’s problem of income inequality: “steal from the rich and give to the poor.” Seems to me that was the original plan…
|
|