Five great reads about the Qing Dynasty.
|
||||
|
With the 90th anniversary of the CCP just around the corner (okay, next July…), the Party brass and their academic ass sucks got together for a high-level history hootenanny. At the kick-off, China’s Heir-Apparent-But-We-Still-Can’t-Admit-That-Publicly-Yet Xi Jinping called for more education regarding the Party’s history. Xi said the Party, having experienced the tests of revolution, development and reform, “successfully united and led the Chinese people to achieve miracles under an extremely complicated circumstance.” “Over the past 89 years, the CPC contributed greatly to the nation’s independence, unification and the people’s well-being,” he said. Well, I for one am relieved…because THAT’S a story that hasn’t been told enough times through China’s education, media, or entertainment industry. I suspect though that Xi’s main message had less to do with trumpeting a triumphalist narrative of Party history than about his accompanying admonition against those who sought to “distort or smear the Party’s history.” For the CCP-impaired or if you are otherwise unaccustomed to Zhongnanhai-speak, allow me to translate: “People are starting to see through all of our bullshit, so we need to pump some ex-lax into the cattle feed and get the shovels ready.” It’s not clear if Xi was responding to an actual threat within The always fun ChinaSMACK blog has a recent translation between a clever student from PKU and a Japanese reporter interviewing students on the Bei Da campus. Readers interested in what passes for witty repartee in the eyes of Chinese netizens can check out the whole post here, but there was this little bit that caught my attention: A: Please watch your wording! I don’t agree with how you’ve put the question. The question implicitly casts China in an unfavourable light. From ancient times to now, China has never had any “heavy burden”. The Chinese people are a open-minded, forward-looking exemplary race, who patiently deal with people, and remaining on friendly terms with their neighbours is China’s virtue. For this reason we acknowledge history without bias, but would never repay unkindness with unkindness. We tolerate reconciliation, including with Japan. Please tell me, what is China and the Chinese people’s “heavy burden”? Have the Chinese people ever done something unforgivable to Japan? The issue is precisely the invasion of China, the heinous crimes of the Japanese who don’t acknowledge history, burning, killing, and plundering in China, madly exterminating the Chinese people. The criminal Japanese don’t acknowledge their crimes or make reparations to History may or may not repeat itself, (The Propellerheads suggest it does, I disagree but I think it comes close enough every once in awhile to scare the bejeezus out of the human race.) But like flu epidemics and movies starring Colin Farrell, certain rhetoric has a nasty habit of reappearing every so often with the same putridity but a new mutation (or marketing campaign) which has fooled us into thinking it’s something new and different. Sixty years before Guantanamo and arguments over military tribunals and “enemies among us,” the US government imprisoned 120,00 people for the crime of having Japanese ancestry. While the historical situation was different, the rhetoric used to justify the internment in the “War aganst Fascism” is eerily reminiscent of the current debate in the face of a “War on Terror.” For those interested in reading more on this dark period in US history, the WaPo Short Stacks blog lists five books on the stories of Japanese-Americans in the internment camps. (h/t Angry Asian Man) Speaking of closely examining past government misdeeds from a historical perspective, back in 1989…oh wait, sorry this is China, never mind. Nevertheless, Quixotic crusading jouro that he is, John Pomfret offers |
||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Jottings from the Granite Studio - All Rights Reserved
|
||||
Criticism, Critical Analysis, and Hurt Feelings
Reading about a new book by Stefan Collini: That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect.
Professor Collini is a professor of intellectual history and English literature at Cambridge University, and in this, his latest book, he looks at the very meaning of criticism, what it means to criticize, and distinguishes the most common understanding of the term (“fault-finding”) with it’s more academic usage, that is the close analysis of a particular subject or text.
Scott McLemee’s short review for Inside Higher Education notes, quite correctly, that in an increasingly poisonous and rancorous atmosphere for the public debate of important topics, understanding the goals and rhetoric of criticism is an important first step to overcoming the resistance to listening to a critical analysis of our own cherished ideas and views. (In the Levensonian language of Modern China, not to let ideas about “what is mine” prevent me from hearing “what might be true.”)
Of course, thinking of this through Levenson, it’s hard not to recall the rather prickly response on the part of the Modern Chinese state (and their supporters and advocates) to recent criticism of their handling of the Nobel Prize. In a recent Global Times masterpiece with the whimsical title of