花崗齋雜記 Jottings from the Granite Studio provides commentary, analysis, and opinion on China and Chinese history. It is written by Jeremiah Jenne, a PhD Candidate at a large public research university in Northern California. Currently, Jeremiah is in Beijing teaching history, doing archival research, and working on his dissertation.
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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 credit. International trade was flourishing through a variety of channels (very little of it as ‘tribute’) in a spiderweb of economic links which spanned from frontier trading posts in Central Asia to Chinese merchants and firms in Southeast Asia.
In such a system, European trade was a minute fraction of the overall domestic and international trade for the Empire at the turn of the 19th century. In his letter, the Qianlong Emperor does not reject the King’s demands because he is afraid of British goods affecting the economy of the Qing Empire, instead he is basically saying he could take their trade or leave it and, as such, the Europeans would be wise not to whinge about the rules.
And this is where we turn to opium…because there’s never a bad time to do that, right?
In the mercantilist mindset of 18th century Europe, trade was a strategic competition between nascent nation-states — the goal was to have a favorable balance of trade vis-a-vis your trading partners. Under these conditions, Europe’s commercial relationship with the Qing Empire was seen as untenable because of all the silver pouring into ‘Celestial Coffers.’ Opium provided the perfect product. It was cheaply produced, in areas directly (or indirectly) under British control, and built its own customer base through use, abuse, and addiction. By the time of the first Opium War in 1840, something like 1/6 of revenue for Great Britain was tied to the China trade in a trading system heavily reliant on the ability of British traders — first as licensees of the British East India Company and later in a private capacity — to import and/or smuggle opium into South China.
But opium is only part of the story. In the early decades of the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution changed patterns of production and exchange. Now the goal was less about balancing payments through trade in commodities but about finding markets for goods created in a system that required overproduction of manufactures. Qing Imperial ‘intransigence’ took on a new significance as the siren call of the “China Market” began to call to the pocketbooks of British commercial interests.
The new mantra for British wannabe China traders: “China really wants to have trade with us, but the crusty old emperor and his mandarins keep holding them back,” went this tale of woe, “If only the Chinese people knew about the joys of free trade they would buy all of our wonderful goods and satisfy our commercial interests…and if they don’t know it (or don’t want to) well, a liberal application of force might be all it takes to get them to open up and buy our shit.”
It’s basically ‘date rape’ as trade policy.
Which brings me to Forbes Magazine. First of all, let me say that the Beijing bureau of Forbes turns out some of the best articles and posts on China and that Gady Epstein is not only a friend of mine but also one of the most thoughtful and insightful journalists working in Beijing. I’m assuming that nobody on this side of the Pacific saw this piece of dreck before it went online. But as bad history goes…this is somewhere between “bathing open mouthed in camel shit” and “making a sex tape with a putrefying walrus carcass.”*
In the 16th century China was one of the leading nations of the world. It was prosperous, economically self-sufficient and isolated. European countries came to China to buy its tea, silks and spices and offered European industrial goods in exchange. But, the Chinese emperor would have none of the European goods, which he outright banned. Hence, gold and silver were the only acceptable medium of exchange.
A problem developed with this trade arrangement in that it was draining Europe of its gold and silver, i.e. its universally accepted currency. In economic terms, this meant trade in Europe was slowing down due to a shortage of currency.
This clearly intolerable situation was remedied when the Europeans found a trade product that the Chinese people wanted, opium. This too was banned as an import by the emperor, but as with all such illicit goods, smuggling on a massive scale occurred. When the emperor began a serious crack down, European ships of war appeared on China’s coast to break the ban resulting in the opium wars. Too late did the emperor discover that there were European goods he needed, modern tools of war.
Where to begin, where to begin, where to begin…how about in 1800 when, China was still one of the leading nations of the world, if not number one by any standard of ‘development.’
Then there’s the problem of “modern weapons.” The Qianlong Emperor sent his letter in 1793, and as I wrote in an early installment of the Bad History Series:
As for the other conflicts, the Qing did have their troubles, troubles not helped by sending the same General Sun of the Vietnam debacle to handle military finances in campaigns against the gurkhas of Nepal. (This was Qianlong’s “you’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie” moment.) There is no doubt that military preparedness was at an all-time low, but lack of MODERN FIREARMS was not the problem. In fact, the Qing were able to conquer so much of Xinjiang, Tibeτ, and Mongolia in large part because they used modern cannons and firearms against people like the Zunghar Mongols who were relying on spears and bows. It was the Qing use of cannon that made them so formidable against the preceding Ming Dynasty and sent the last Ming emperors scrambling in the early 17th century to overturn their “no foreign firearm manufacturing” edict just as the forces of Nurhaci & Sons were helping themselves to everything north of the Great Wall.
It was not until the fruits of the industrial revolution began to sweep through the British military (beginning about three decades AFTER the Qianlong letter) that British technology could play a decisive role in a military encounter with the Qing. Most notably, the use of steam-powered gunships gave the British a huge tactical advantage along the Chinese coast. Of course Qianlong didn’t know about these in 1793, Robert Fulton wouldn’t launch his first steamship until ten years later. The Qianlong Emperor was an arrogant and pompous jackass at times, but let’s not fault the man because the crystal ball was broken.
Second, and really it’s more like 1C, Qianlong did not ban British (never mind foreign) goods from the Qing Empire, that’s just plain wrong. While it’s true that European traders had to conduct their business within the context of the “Canton System,” many fortunes were made in the China trade.
Third, The Forbes article in theory is about China and the gold market, so the author feels the need to lump gold in with silver as the currencies flowing into China during the bad old days of the early 19th century. Actually, almost all of the trade with China was conducted in silver. In short, not only is the author’s history bad, the whole point of this ill-conceived juxtaposition of past and present is seriously flawed.
Finally, using the Opium War to harangue the current Chinese administration over trade policy is not only bad history but in bad taste. The Qing government had every right to ban the import of opium and to set conditions by which trade was conducted within the empire. The effects of the war and the subsequent treaties and imperialist aggression against the Qing Empire caused enormous and unnecessary suffering . For a government so exasperated with the Qing Empire’s failure to see the rationality of commerce and comity between equal and sovereign nations, the British (and the Americans, and the French, and the Russians, and the Germans, and the Japanese…) seemed awfully eager to impose conditions on the Qing court that undermined the sovereignty of the Empire.
That said, the lessons of the Opium War are not without their value in understanding the current stormy climate in China’s relations with the North Atlantic states of Europe and North America. Right or wrong, the Chinese government (and, frankly, many Chinese people) feel that the constant barrage of criticism of trade, human rights, etc. coming from those same nations which a little over a century ago were still imposing — with guns ready — unequal treaties on China to be just more of the same but in a velvet glove.
Now I think most observers can see the enormous difference between, say, an article in the Guardian supporting Liu Xiaobo and the actions of opium traders lobbying parliament into declaring war on the Qing Empire…but neither can we entirely fault the Chinese if some people see this as a distinction without a difference. And articles like the Forbes piece do little to assuage such paranoia.
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*Though still above such categories of utter atrociousness as “Sharing hygiene products with Lyndsay Lohan,” “Having your back waxed by Genghis Khan,” “The Dallas Cowboys 2010-2011 Season,” and “History as done by the Chinese State Media.”
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of environmentalist and scholar Liang Congjie on October 28. Liang was an advocate for the preservation of China’s environment and founded the first environmental NGO to be officially recognized by the PRC government when he registered Friends of Nature in 1994.
As most know, he came by his activist impulses naturally. His father was the architect and preservationist Liang Sicheng and his grandfather was of course Liang Qichao, one of the most important voices of reform in the early 20th century.
New York Times has an obituary and there’s also a very thoughtful remembrance by Christina Larson on the Atlantic Monthly website.
A few months ago I wrote a post about the Korean War and how the dominant narrative here in the PRC about the start of that bloody conflict has changed over time. While it’s true that the nitwits in the CCP (and the academics who shill for them) frequently rely more on “truthiness” than actual evidence when discussing history, in the case of the Korea even the most hardcore sheep couldn’t continue to bleat the previous party line that it was the US and the American ROK puppets who invaded the north and started the war.
Well, as any partially housebroken border collie can tell you — herding sheep is a hard way to make a living.
Speaking at an event commemorating the 60th anniversary of China’s ‘volunteers’ entering the Korean War, CCP heir apparent and hair product aficionado Xi Jinping once again let the gel do the talking:
In his address on behalf of the CPC Central Committee and the CMC, Xi said that the Chinese movement 60 years ago was “a great and just war for safeguarding peace and resisting aggression.”
“It was also a great victory gained by the united combat forces of China’s and the DPRK’s civilians and soldiers, and a great victory in the pursuit of world peace and human progress,” Xi said.
Huh?
Well…I’ll give the volunteers credit for stopping MacArthur from fulfilling his wildest Genghis Khan fantasies and invading the PRC, but considering that the DPRK’s goal was to reunify the Korean peninsula by force, it takes a special kind of moron to call the Korean War a “a great victory” never mind one in the pursuit of “world peace and human progress.”
Fortunately, most actual historians in the PRC are well aware of the trove of documents from the USSR and other archives that detail the origins of the Korean War, and even school textbooks (a bastion of CCP truthiness if there ever was one) punt the question of who started the war with a tepid “After the war started, China….”
First of all, I’m going to really enjoy the Xi Jinping era. If this is the kind of unintentional comedy we can expect from the Hair Apparent for the next decade then I’m all for it.
BUT…South Korea was less than pleased by Xi’s remarks. (Oddly enough, the DPRK press was quite supportive , hmmm…) This of course all came on the heels of Yang Jiechi throwing an absolute hissy fit at a meeting of Southeast Asian states this past July. Then the fracas with Japan. Whatever your feelings on the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands, the Chinese government’s handling of the mess was amateur at best, and the number of times I read an article — from both sides — leading off with “history proves…” (which is of course code for “the writer of this piece has no understanding of history as a discipline”) made me want to start chewing on my own extremities. And, frankly, whenever a Chinese politician or editorial writer bases an ‘argument’ on “China has never provoked anyone” or “China has never invaded a neighbor” the good people of Vietnam must just roll their eyes and wonder if the only reason anybody remembers 1979 is because it was the last time the Pirates actually won a World Series. For a group so ready to whinge about historical inaccuracies and demand apologies for every perceived slight, the rhetoric coming from the CCP toward its Asian neighbors over the past few months has been oddly tone deaf…
Ah, Xi Jinping: like some sort of unholy cross between Glenn Beck and a rabid wombat, it’s gonna be a wild ride. Thanks for getting an early start.
Most people have seen the “2030″ advertisement produced by Citizens Against Government Waste. It’s an atrocious ad — not the least of all because it’s factually wrong — and sad proof that no matter how you dress it up, ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Fu Manchu’ are alive and well and lingering in the American psyche.
Fortunately, not everybody is taking the ad seriously, a campus group has released their own version, one which mocks the xenophobia and factual inaccuracies of the original. CAGW was unamused and has gone to great lengths to have the offending spoof removed from video sharing sites like YouTube, in a campaign against dissent that the WSJ Real Time China Report points out seems eerily reminiscent of the CCP circa 2010.
It’s hardly surprising, really. It’s a political axiom that the extremes often have a lot in common, and this is certainly true of the CCP and the American Right. In a recent piece on the desperation of the conservative media to smear President Obama for any slight or wrongdoing no matter how trivial, James Fallows remarked, “The combination of ignorance, lack of curiosity, and certitude is a very difficult one to offset.” Anyone who has spent even a few minutes watching Fox News or listening to conservative talk radio will immediately recognize the willful ignorance and proud parochialism wrapped in the flag of defiant anti-intellectualism which characterizes the Tea Party movement and their supporters. (See: Palin, Sarah)
But this ‘ignorant incurious certitude’ (to use Fallows’ phrase) is also very much a defining quality of the Chinese state media and Chinese nationalists. Paranoid xenophobia is the propaganda’s bureau most common coin, in fact one wonders if they know how to write any other way. The whole state media apparatus (and not a few nitwit nationalist Internet commenters) labor under a profound cognitive dissonance caused when trying to reconcile a pathetically narrow worldview with an increasingly cacophonous din of alternative perspectives and opposing evidence — in short, to borrow from Levenson, that which is mine is colliding against that which is true and the result is well…somebody like Li Hongmei.
What the American Right doesn’t realize however is that Li Hongmei is just a bespectacled slightly prim version of Ann Coulter; Xinhua and Fox News actually have a whole lot in common. Both maintain a thin fiction of objectivity while in reality functioning as the propaganda department for a single party. Neither has any room for ‘opposition,’ unless it’s to set up said opposition as a straw man. Finally, both are tone-deaf to their own inherent shrillness.
Perhaps the greatest commonality is this: When confronted with a situation that clearly challenges (if not dismantles) their painstakingly constructed ideological facades, rather than rise to the challenge, both organizations have an unsettling habit of diving for the deepest part of the muck — xenophobia and fear.
It’s amazing what people will choose to care about. As yet another CCP film/wankfest (“Red Army Expedition East”) commences production, the actor selected to play the role of heroic, young-ish Mao is causing a bit of a stir.
Zhang Tielin, the 53-year old actor perhaps most well-known for playing various and sundry Manchus, has been deemed insufficiently Chinese to play the role of the Great Helmsman-in-training because Zhang is a British citizen. Oh, the horrors.
As usual, the nationalist nitwit brigade has been in a tizzy over this scandalous situation.
Peter Foster reports on the uproar in the Telegraph:
“It’s an insult to Chairman Mao. I strongly protest and suggest that the relevant State Administration authorities intervene,” said one contributor to ifeng.com, the news website of China’s Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV.
“It is not enough to resemble Mao in outlook and temperament,” said another on a site called the Voice of China, “the actor must be politically qualified in terms of identity. Otherwise it will be a blasphemy to Mao and will hurt the feelings of billions of Chinese.”
Leaving aside that there are only one billion (and change) of Chinese, does it really matter?
After all, looking at the list of actors who have portrayed American revolutionary (and other) leaders is like dropping into a pub near Piccadilly.
George Washington, father of the country and implacable foe of the British Empire, has been played by West Midlands-born actor Frank Windsor. When Propagandist and diplomat Benjamin Franklin famously said “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” he wasn’t worried about the Swiss. And yet in the recent HBO miniseries John Adams, Franklin’s character was reduced to a foppish womanizer by the likes of Tom Wilkinson. In the same series, Thomas Jefferson, our third president and the principal architect of the document severing our connection with King and Country forever, was played by…yep, you guessed it…another Brit, Stephen Dillane. Jefferson has even on occasion been portrayed by a Kiwi.
Now at least the filmmakers could make the claim that Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin were all born in a British colony and so technically British…but here’s a trivia question: Name the first President who was born an American citizen AND who was at the same time the first president not of British descent?
That’s right, Martin Van Buren, born in 1782 and who grew up speaking Dutch at home. Does that matter to Hollywood? Of course not, if the casting of Nigel Hawthorne (born in England, raised in South Africa) in Amistad is any indication.
Even our lesser presidents get the foreign treatment. Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins has made a specialty of playing bad presidents, first as John Quincy Adams (also in Amistad) and, perhaps more notoriously, as the title character in Oliver Stone’s Nixon.
Hell, Randy Quaid won a Golden Globe playing a future president and that dude just filed for asylum in Canada.
So once again, my message to Chinese nationalists…LIGHTEN UP. It’s not so bad. A disturbing percentage of my fellow Americans think our current and ACTUAL president is secretly a Kenyan mole and, besides…it’s not like Mao is being played by a Japanese actor, right?
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 devils! Kill the foreign devils!”
At the other end of the spectrum is the exhibition “Disturbed Dreams in the Ruins of the Garden,” which showcases a stunning collection of photographs taken by the German photographer Ernst Ohlmer in 1873. The 72 images in “Disturbed Dreams” — which was shown at the Beijing World Art Museum over the summer and will be featured at the Shanghai Art Museum for six months in 2011 — were made from 12 large glass negatives tracked down and purchased by Qin Feng, a Taiwan-born journalist and collector.
Believed to be the earliest Yuanmingyuan photos in existence, the images lovingly depict the “Western-style palaces” designed by the Jesuit missionaries Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining) and Michel Benoit (Jiang Youren).
The problem with choosing symbols for their political potency is that the things and places and people politicians choose already come freighted with baggage, meanings, and symbolic values that may be at odds with the ideology political leaders seek to espouse.
Consider this:
- Yuanmingyuan was burned in a wanton display of power by the Anglo-French expedition of 1860, but most of the palace was torn down over time as the stones and brick were carted away by local farmers seeking a ready supply of cheap building materials.
- The main ruins, those of the “Western Style Palaces” and the ones well known around China as the symbol of the West’s ‘vicious attack’ on China and Chinese culture, were designed by two Jesuit priests as a pleasure garden for the Manchu rulers who had conquered Ming China and made it the centerpiece of their expanding Eurasian empire.
- These two Jesuit priests respected the Qing emperors and appreciated Chinese civilization enough
 that they spent most of their lives in the service of the court even as the Vatican and other Catholic orders were strongly critical of the cozy nature of this arrangement.
- The European and American forces invaded Beijing to conclude a war declared on the most bogus pretext of any 19th century military adventure — and that includes The Maine in Havana harbor.
- As with other armed conflicts between the Qing and the North Atlantic powers in the 19th century, the inability of key members of court to realize that no matter how detestable the enemy, continuing to engage militarily only compounded the damages of defeat.
- The British and French troops (and Americans, and Russians, and quite a few local Chinese farmers) carted away tons of precious artifacts and a few family pets from the Yuanmingyuan in accordance with internationally accepted ‘law’ regarding the spoils of war before torching the place. If there was conflict between local Chinese and the foreign invaders it was mostly over who could grab the most loot.
- The French originally wanted to burn the Forbidden City, but the British, fearing that in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion such an act would finish the dynasty and not wanting to face either a) a Taiping-ruled empire or b) a ‘break it, you buy it’ situation which would mean administering yet ANOTHER continent-sized Asian colony only three years removed from the Sepoy Mutiny, decided to focus their wrath on what the emperor loved most — his pleasure gardens in the northwest part of Beijing.
At the end of the day, the decision to wage war against the Qing Empire following the Arrow Incident of 1856 was one of the most savage and blatant examples of the North Atlantic imperialist powers attempting to force concessions from the Qing Empire. Even as English writers trumpeted the need to bring China into the ‘comity of nations’ based on the rules of equality and national sovereignty, the imperialist powers sought to use military force to compel the Qing court to sign treaties which further eroded Qing sovereignty.
This past June I did a little series on this blog about History, Violence and Memory. Writing about the Boxer Uprising and the subsequent foreign invasion of 1900, I argued that including nuance and complexity in the the story of Yuanmingyuan doesn’t change one bit the larger theme of the destructive affects of imperialism in China, unless of course your goal isn’t to teach history but to ‘teach patriotism.’
Even if you add all of these messy details to the textbook narrative, it doesn’t fundamentally alter the basic premise that the foreign powers were aggressive, arrogant, and willing to use force to get what they wanted no matter how unreasonable the demand with the inevitable result that this considerable amount of resentment and hostility was bound to erupt into violence (as it did many times throughout the 19th century) culminating in the large-scale bloodshed of 1900.
So what if the Boxers lacked “nationalist” consciousness, or if there were killings and atrocities on both sides, or that most of the provincial officials thought that the Qing decision to “declare war” was so daft they completely ignored several imperial decrees and put their offices (if not possibly more) in peril?
I’ve read that kids who are too protected from germs, who grow up in homes scrubbed and re-scrubbed in antiseptics and disinfectants, are actually more likely to get sick and develop allergies than the kids who play outside in the dirt every day. Apparently it has something to do with exposure to all kinds of things, messy things, and so developing the bodies ability to handle the presence of mess.
History used to teach patriotism isn’t history, it’s propaganda pure and simple. Why bother when the story is so powerful on its own as to defy the crude attempts to paint it purely in black and white? When told with all the colors in the historian’s palette, there is enough to justify outrage and even more to stimulate some actual critical thinking about the past and its relationship to our lives in the present.
 A wind farm along the highway outside of Urumqi, Xinjiang. Taken September, 2010
The CCP wants a Nobel. Not one they have to share with France. Not one where they have to explain why Chinese scientists are doing their best and most innovative work in other countries. And certainly nothing that may elevate the status of a certain Tibetan monk. They want one to cuddle. One to hold. One to make all their very own.
 But for the CCP, having the first home turf Chinese Nobel be awarded to Charter 08 writer and activist Liu Xiaobo must feel a bit like losing your virginity and waking up the next morning with a scorching case of herpes.
I don’t think anybody seriously expects Liu’s Nobel to change anything for the better. At least in the short term. The small cottage industry in essays published this morning along the lines of “Are we sure this won’t make things worse?” are putting forward a straw man argument.
Change, when it comes to China, will not be sparked by the Nobel committee or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Nor will it be due to the heroic (or Quixotic, depending on your perspective) activism of Liu Xiaobo and his associates. It will only come when grievances and demands breach the walls of class interest and regional difference to create the kinds of linkages seen in 1919 or 1949 or 1989.
What Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize does do is expose as hollow a false premise relating to China’s government: that of gradual evolution.
Is the human rights situation better now than 35 years ago? Of course. Better than 10 years ago? Maybe. But the gradual easing of some of the most onerous and barbaric practices of ‘social stability’ can obscure the simple fact that the CCP fundamentally does not believe in sharing power whether with the people or another party. At the root of every decision made by the Party, the first order of business (their Prime Directive, for you closet Trekkies) is “How will this affect our hold on power?”
Fix the environment? Address endemic corruption? Answer calls by farmers for justice in land disputes with developers and local officials? These are all important government priorities…so long as the solutions do not weaken one iota the Party’s grip on the government and country.
We’ve seen this before. In the waning decades of the Qing Empire, the Manchu court under Empress Dowager Cixi and an increasingly conservative inner circle of Manchu notables faced a number of devastating internal problems as well as the constant threats of rapacious and violent imperialist powers. Those officials — or writers — who sought change, who proposed the kind of systemic and institutional reforms needed to stem the tide of decline, found their voices lost in the cacophony of an insecure and frightened court who saw such systemic changes to be the vanguard of Manchu irrelevance.
The CCP today is in a far stronger position than the Manchus of old. By an order of magnitude. Yet the way they look at the world as they take turns peeking out through the walls of Zhongnanhai is so very similar to Cixi and her flunkies. As a result, the CCP response last night was as predictable as it was banal: “The decision disgraced the Nobel Prize.”
And that was just last night.
This morning they are faced with people going on line and trying to find out who this Liu Xiaobo character is anyway and why the hell did he win a prize. The Foreign Ministry can call Liu Xiaobo a criminal, but they also have to answer questions about which laws were broken and why in 2010 such laws are still necessary.
The CCP can mess with Sina Weibo, black out CNN for 20 minutes at a time, and block transmission of Liu Xiaobo’s name via SMS…but the more they take such measures the more they come across as scared and petty. They can rant and rave about ‘Western imperialism’ and make veiled accusations of dastardly ‘outside forces’ (the same allegations the FBI used to make about Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon once upon a time) but to do so makes them seem shrill and paranoid…and sounding like a crazy ex-girlfriend on your voice mail just isn’t really the best diplomacy.
As of 8:30 this morning, the domestic media is simply repeating the official rebuke from last night and then…deafening silence. I think the idea here is “If I don’t say anything, everybody will think it was the dog who farted not me.” Always a winning PR strategy.
The fact is that the CCP doesn’t need to do this anymore. More than one commentator in the past 24 hours has referred to the debacle as a “PRC own goal.” If government hadn’t been so freaked out by Charter 08 and sentenced Liu Xiaobo to prison (on December 25, 2009 figuring that the Western world would be too deep in egg nog to care…how’s that plan working out right about now?) then the Nobel committee wouldn’t have given this guy the time of day. Not to take anything away from Liu’s obvious set of large brass ones or his and his family’s sacrifice, but this Prize is as much a testament to the CCP’s continued paranoia and basic stupidity when confronted with even the most mild of statements for systemic or institutional change as it is about any one man.
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*Favorite random moment of last night: Reports on Twitter that young people were buying Norwegian salmon for dinner as a way of saying “thanks” to Norway. Hope this doesn’t lead to a petulant government ban. I’m doing seafood buffet at noon.
This is a post from 2009 with a special relevance this evening in the wake of LXB winning the Nobel Prize. The original post seems to be blocked probably because it referred to a certain charter in the title and url. Hopefully, this re-post stays up longer. I originally wrote to remember the birthday of the New Culture era educational reformer Cai Yuanpei, one of the leading figures of an era when many people in China sought a new way forward for the country, open to many different ideas and values rather than sit idly blinkered by petty nationalism and parochialism. Enjoy.
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Today is the birthday of Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940). [Originally posted on January 11, 2009] A classically-trained scholar who later decided to broaden his education and study in Germany, he was Minister of Education (briefly) under Yuan Shikai and (more famously) the chancellor of Peking University during the New Culture Era. Chancellor Cai took over a campus squalid with the scions of the idle rich and transformed it into a hotbed of intellectual dynamism for a new age. Cai took risks, hiring firebrands such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, and luring young scholars such as Hu Shi back from abroad. The dining halls and classrooms of the school brimmed with the kind of debate that forges ideas and ideologies, and the campus became the epicenter of one of the most fertile and exciting times in China’s (or any other country’s) intellectual history.
Hu Shi revitalized the study of China’s past, introduced new ideas of philosophy and learning to the student body, and changed the way Chinese was written and read. Chen Duxiu’s magazine La Jeunesse (New Youth) was snatched up immediately whenever a shipment dropped, young students and intellectuals rushing to buy the few precious copies printed and distributed. In those pages Li Dazhao introduced Marxism, Mao Zedong published his first essay, and a whole generation learned the language of individual liberation and political revolution.
But most people didn’t care.
The vast majority of the Chinese population had never heard of Chen Duxiu or Li Dazhao, hadn’t ever seen a copy of New Youth and were too busy making ends meet to read it in any case. For most people, Peking University was as lofty and remote an environment as the far side of the moon.
And yet during the May 4th Movement of 1919 the new youth took to the streets in anger and frustration, a movement that — much to the shock and dismay of the government — spread throughout the different classes of society. Workers joined students joined urban residents in a potent alliance and the government fell.
Today’s “kinder gentler” CCP does tolerate dissent…to a point. And that point is when dissent looks to have the potential to spread to different geographic regions or among disparate social classes and thus link together areas or groups in common cause. This is the CCP’s nightmare.
This brings me to Charter 08. Charter 08 is the product of a single class: the intelligentsia, a group which Roland Soong aptly notes is hardly unified in ideology, ambitions, or style. Nevertheless, there has been some snickering among the usual suspects that Charter 08 is simply the work of eggheads, out-of-touch bookworms who don’t understand (or don’t care about) the priorities of “real people.” More conspiratorially, some suggest Charter 08 to be the work of US-government backed moles in the Chinese intelligentsia, that the signers of Charter 08 have been “pallin’ around with splittists.” Anti-intellectualism and innuendo: It seems those who seek to defend the CCP against such ominous harbingers of doom like “not arresting people for voicing their opinion” and “relaxing controls on the media” have taken as their rhetorical role model Sarah Palin. Good luck with that strategy.
The truth is, however, that Charter 08 is unlikely to have a major impact, at least in the short run. First of all, the government is up on its history, and takes great pains to isolate and denigrate groups who express inconvenient opinions. In a recent interview with the NPR show “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” Atlantic Monthly national correspondent James Fallows expressed grudging admiration for the current regime’s ability to influence debate; not merely blacking out information, but spinning the conversation by controlling what information remains easily accessed.
But to dismiss the importance of Charter 08 because it is the product of a single class (or sub-group within that class) is to miss a lesson of history. With a nod to Margaret Mead, I might suggest that modern Chinese history has had its own share of small groups of committed individuals whose ideas did not receive their due when first published or spoken but whom we now look back upon as transformational figures: Wang Tao, Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, Li Dazhao, even Mao Zedong. This is not to say that the authors of Charter 08 are destined to enter such a hallowed pantheon, only that history warns us not to immediately dismiss their ideas because “only” 2000 intellectuals signed the document.
In 1919, our birthday boy Cai Yuanpei wrote:
“With regard to ideas, I act according to the general rule of the various universities of the world, following the principle of “freedom of thought” and adopting the policy of tolerating everything and including everything…Regardless of what schools of academic thought there may be, if their words are reasonable and there is cause for maintaining them, and they have not yet reached the fate of being eliminated by nature, then even though they disagree with each other, I would let them develop in complete freedom.”
Hear, hear.
So…Liu Xiaobo has won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think it’s great that Norwegians can cause so much discomfort in the halls of Zhongnanhai, unfortunately the timing of the announcement means that Yajun is going to be at work for the evening…kinda screwing with our plans to celebrate her birthday.
So…congratulations Liu Xiaobo but couldn’t the Nobel committee have waited a day?
Random thoughts after three weeks on the road…
Back in Beijing and it’s now fall. Fall is easily the loveliest time of the year here in the city of imperial dust. Unfortunately, it’s also the shortest season. How short? Last year I missed it because I had a meeting that afternoon.
Taking advantage of the weather and the holiday, YJ and I trekked over to Haidian Park for the first day of the Modern Sky Festival. Coolest moment: braving a short cloudburst with 500 or so Chinese hippies as the band Sound Fragment (声音碎片) played onstage and took us through the rain and out the other side into a (rare) gorgeous sunset behind the Western Hills.
Least cool moment: As much as I (and others) like to complain about Chinese crowd behavior on the subway, in the mall, etc. One place where it kind of works is at an outdoor concert with festival seating. In fact, the real douchebags pushing and shoving their way drunkenly through the crowd are usually the Lao Wai.
(Yeah, I’m looking at you drunk China newbie with the Jägermeister thundersticks shoving your way to the front midway through Second Hand Rose’s set.)
Funniest moment: Douchebag’s equally drunken Chinese girlfriend not once, but twice, being dropped on her head while attempting to crowd surf. Fortunately, tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum had spent enough time in the Jäger tent that she was feeling no pain and was up and bouncing around like a meth-crazed jackalope within seconds each time. How she’s feeling this morning though might be another matter entirely…
Finally a couple of quick observations from my trip out west:
1) A lot of Uighurs do not like the Han and are vocal about it. My students kind of knew this going in, but were a bit shocked by how often they heard it.
2) Han Chinese tourists in Xinjiang generally dress and act like they are on safari…which may in some small way play a role in the situation described above.
3) The food was awesome. Every night was like eating at Crescent Moon or Tumaris except that it was about half as expensive and the service twice as friendly.
4) After Xian I was without Internet so I have a couple of posts stored up which I’ll put on the blog sometime later this week. Xinjiang does have Internet and my students made ample use of the local wang ba to go online. Me? I find Chinese internet bars depressing in a kind of “Atlantic City casino with the old grannies sucking oxygen, chain smoking Merits, and pissing away their social security one quarter at a time” way. (Lower the age, replace slot machines with World of Warcraft, Merits with Zhongnanhai’s, and ‘quarters’ with ‘education’ and you’re almost there.)
5) Off to Brunch…
 I was taking a picture of the doorway when this young cyclist zipped through the picture. Kashgar, September 2010.
Just got back from a weekend student mobile learning trip to Hangzhou and Nanjing. Good times as always, but I’ve done that trip about five times now and so the excitement of the road is less than what it used to be.
Fortunately, I’m heading out somewhere I’ve never been before…yep, I’m heading west along the Silk Road for Xinjiang. The students and I will be taking a train to Xi’an tonight and then on to Lanzhou/Xiahe, Dunhuang, Turpan, Urumqi, before ultimately ending up in the city of Kashgar.
It’s been a busy month or so with research and the first few weeks of school, especially because I begin every semester with a two-week course on “Understanding China” that meets daily for 2.5 hours. In addition to my usual semester-long course on “Late Imperial China” plus administrative tasks…you can understand why leading a trip of 15 students through the wilds of western China might seem like something of a break from the daily grind.
What if the Chinese government suffered from Wikileaks? In the New York Review of Books, Perry Link ponders this hypothetical as the Party wrestles to keep control of history and faces its own problems with leaked documents and a sudden boomlet in memoirs by departed (and soon-to-be departed) leaders trying to put a final spin on their legacies as they make their way up the stairs to meet Marx.
At issue is the power of archives and memory. Once opened, archives offer historians, scholars, journalists, researchers and all manner of other interested parties access to the primary stuff from which narratives are constructed. Limiting access to this information is essential for any group that seeks to maintain a particular narrative, all the more so if the archive contains materials which complicate or contradict that narrative.
George Orwell famously wrote, “He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present, controls the future.” A corollary to Orwell is: He who controls the archives — the actual room with the paper or the server with the emails — has a huge advantage in controlling that past.
Professor Link concludes:
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of reasons why Chinese officials have been so assiduous in guarding archives. One is that the prestige of the regime as a whole depends upon the image of the Party as heroic, patriotic, and the definition of modern China. The young must be taught to love the Party. Stories about internecine strife? About causing a huge famine? The people might not love us anymore, and might rebel.
The other kind of reason is much more personal. Each official has to watch out for his or her own self and family. A political “mistake” can ruin your career, even land you in prison, and archives are where your enemies can go to look for grounds to charge you with “mistakes”. Mao allowed his people to open archives to look for material on Liu Shaoqi and other enemies during the Cultural Revolution; a few years later archives were opened again as people looked for material on the Maoist “Gang of Four.”
The anonymous reporter who leaked the contents of the July 21 meeting commented on a looming atmosphere of demise at the meeting. The underlying mood, he suggested, was, We had better get control of these archives, and perhaps destroy them, before a day of reckoning is upon us.
As Beijing swirls with rumors about the ill-health of several former leaders, that day of reckoning may be closer than we think. A true history of Modern China cannot be written without access to these archives, if they are lost, so too is the ability of historians and future generations to remember and assess the legacy of the CCP.
Perhaps this is why the leaders are so worried.
 Storm clouds rolling through Inner Mongolia's Big Sky Country. Photo taken on Hulunbeir Grasslands, September 2009
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Liu Xiaobo and YJ’s Birthday
So…Liu Xiaobo has won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think it’s great that Norwegians can cause so much discomfort in the halls of Zhongnanhai, unfortunately the timing of the announcement means that Yajun is going to be at work for the evening…kinda screwing with our plans to celebrate her birthday.
So…congratulations Liu Xiaobo but couldn’t the Nobel committee have waited a day?