Rolling the Dice in Macau

It has been almost a decade now since China regained control of Macau, but the city’s present and future crops up in news coverage much less than Hong Kong, another reclaimed colony. We’re delighted, then, to be able to run this piece about Macau from someone who has been spending time there, meditating on not only whether or not Macau is democratizing but also how Macau’s relationship to the mainland and the world is changing its economy and society. For those interested in background information on Macau, see the reading list that follows the piece.

By Dustin Wright

Sitting in a hip dessert shop recently, I asked three University of Macau undergraduates, all Macau natives, what they thought about Macau’s new Chief Executive-elect, Fernando Chui. He is only the second person to hold the post since the Portuguese handover in 1999.

“I don’t really think about it,” one told me. “Young people here don’t really think about who is in the government.” The two others nodded in agreement. “Connections are the most important thing to succeed in Macau. Anyone here who is rich was born rich.”

Such apathy can be understood, given that Chui’s appointment as the new head of Macau was decided by a 300-member “election committee” comprised of the city’s elite, many of whom have strong ties to PRC officials. Chui, the former Secretary of Social Affairs and Culture and holder of college degrees from the United States, including a PhD in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma, will be officially sworn in this December. The victory of his unopposed election was a foregone conclusion, emphasized by the fact that The Macau Daily lead with a headline declaring Chui’s victory before the vote actually took place. An online poll at the English language MacauNews.com showed that 44 percent of respondents felt that Chui’s top priority should be combating public corruption, while only 2.3 percent stressed the importance for political reforms. This strong displeasure towards corruption was likely exacerbated by a recent high-profile case involving a former official in Macau, now serving 28 years in prison.

However, not everyone is apathetic toward the election process. On election day, pro-democracy legislators unveiled banners and staged a protest in front of the iconic façade of St. Paul’s ruins, calling for universal suffrage by 2019. The rally hinted at the fact that political (and economic) disparities are just as Macanese as Portuguese egg tarts.

As with the changing of the guard in the Chief Executive’s office, the gaming sector might also be in a state of transition. For nearly four decades, the casino industry has been heavily influenced by one man, the philoprogenitive Stanley Ho, whose failing health has raised speculation as to who will make up (and benefit from) Macau’s next generation of corporatists.

All of this begs the question: What is the Macau that Chui will soon be running?

Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) is a city of variations, scattered with amalgamations, and permeated with assimilations. Since the sixteenth century, Macau’s seemingly effortless blending of cultures has impressed and marveled those who visited and inhabited this Portuguese outpost on the Pearl River Delta. “Culturally,” writes Austin Coates, “there has never been anything like Macao, where so much of China and so much of Europe are enshrined in one small place.”[1] Wang Zeng Yang, President of the Cultural Institute of Macau, remarked that this is a city “where different cultures are treated not as mere rituals, but instead, as truly symbiotic, as totally complimentary,” and that “even tourists in Taiwan advise their friends if they wish to know Europe but do not want to take long trips, to visit Macau, to know how it feels to be in a European city.”[2] At a very cosmopolitan and Iberian dinnertime of 10:00 p.m., you might find yourself dining on stewed bacalhau (Portuguese salted fish) and African chicken. At the same restaurant the previous night, it was mapo tofu, steamed Chinese broccoli drowned in oyster sauce, and eggplant sautéed in oil and chilies, washed down with milk tea.

Just as identity and cuisine are in constant motion in Macau, so is the movement of capital. Since the handover of Macau back to Chinese rule a decade ago, and the relaxation of monopolistic gaming licenses in 2002, foreign casino operators have set up shop at a dizzying pace. Macau peninsula—along with the islands of Taipa and Coloane—makes up only 29 square kilometers and often goes unnoticed when compared to the larger Hong Kong SAR. However, in terms of generating wealth, size doesn’t matter: Las Vegas is 7.5 times bigger than Macau, yet more money is generated in the SAR than Sin City.

Climbing up the hill to Guia Fortress, one of the many historical sites that pepper the peninsula, one can see much of Macau spread out below. Looking south, the Sands Macao Hotel, which is responsible for fully two thirds of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s profit, fights for elbow room with a bevy of Chinese and foreign-owned casinos. Large condominium complexes are still being built within sight, though at a slower pace than this time last year. Fisherman’s Wharf, a Disneylandesque amusement park built in the images of famous landmarks and cities, including a mock Coliseum, sits atop 111,500 square meters of concrete along the waterfront. Even Isidoro Francisco Guimarães, governor of Macau from 1851 to 1863 and the first to introduce licensed gambling, could hardly have imagined the garishness of the city today.

To the west, towards the central business district of Macau, one can see the immense and lotus-shaped Grand Lisboa rising from a sea of comparatively diminutive casinos, along with banks, shopping malls, pastel-colored cathedrals, and apartment blocks. Nearby, a towering needle, complete with a rotating restaurant and bar, confirms Macau’s ascension as a tourist haven. Wynn Macau is visible, a casino as much as a high-end shopping bonanza for tourists, most of whom come from mainland China. An American expat working in Macau told me about his experience watching a man, who was half-naked and sweating profusely, struggle to fit into a shirt while standing in the middle of Wynn’s Giorgio Armani store. I asked why the store personnel would allow such behavior, to which the expat, shocked by my ignorance, replied without pause, “Because he had money.” (When Henry Kissinger came to Macau a few months ago to speak at Macao Polytechnic University, his old friend, Steve Wynn, made sure to come to listen and, perhaps, comped the former Secretary of State’s room at the Wynn Macau.)

On a clear day you can catch a glimpse of a smattering of islands to the east, the largest of which is Lantau, part of Hong Kong SAR, while to the north is the city of Zhuhai, gateway to Guangdong Province and mainland China, visible from much of Macau. Travelling between the SARs and the mainland ensures one’s passport is stamped with the frequency of a pre-EU jaunt through Europe.

It’s a small city, yes, but the numbers are big. Macau’s population is roughly 560,000, nearly identical to that of Las Vegas. With such a small land area, Macau is one of the mostly densely populated places on earth. Government figures indicate that 23 million people visited Macau in 2008 and helped the city generate nearly $22 billion in GDP. With so many visitors spending so much money, Macau is a city that truly never sleeps.

The massive expansion of Macau’s gaming industry dovetailed with the global real estate gorge of the last decade, giving way to a bevy of expensive condominium projects, followed by the subsequent drop in market prices late last year. In Senado Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a lodestone for tourists, the young professionals who bought many of those condos bark into Blackberries and loosen their European-brand ties, while tourist families vie for space to take their portraits in front of the picturesque St. Dominic’s Church. Macau’s overall standard of living is quite high, with a quality-of-life index comparable to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

However, even with the huge influx of capital (or because of it), economic inequality is prevalent. Not far away from Senado Square, in an area known as Fátima Parish, lies a rusted and mosquito-infested slum, where elderly women can be seen washing dishes at a communal spigot. It isn’t a unique example of poverty in greater China, but it’s proximity to the corporatist wealth of the casinos makes the disparity all the more egregious. Inoperable cars sit on blocks as they are slowly parted out, while above, a messy labyrinth of wires indicates that much of electricity that people can access in this area is pirated. It is a squatter community of mostly mainland Chinese immigrants, some of whom entered Macau illegally but were later granted legal status. Until 1979, Chinese mainlanders could enter Macau without restriction, though it was illegal for them to do so under PRC law. Portuguese administrators tacitly endorsed the immigration of Chinese mainlanders, eager to have a ready supply of cheap labor that could be easily repatriated once their labor had been exploited.

Fatima Parish. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
The size of the slum has been halved since 1991, mostly through government campaigns to tear down the shacks and build high-rise housing and commercial buildings, evicting many of the squatters once their labor had been utilized to build the more expensive new real estate. Today, these towers loom over the shacks of corrugated tin that remain. Even though the slum is physically smaller and stronger immigration laws have made it more difficult for mainlanders to come to Macau, squatters are just as essential for today’s labor demands as they were twenty years ago. Sociologist D.Y. Yuan, a longtime researcher of Macau’s immigrant community, writes that, “Squatters have continuously provided a cheap source of labor, helping Macau to remain competitive in the international trade market.”[3] Last year’s census indicates that there was an increase of 8.2 percent in the number of “non-resident workers,” making up a population of over 92,000, many of whom have less than a junior high school education. Most of these workers are not salaried staff in the casinos (jobs which can require expensive training) but are instead employed in construction and more vulnerable to the global recession. When the economic crisis hit last fall, many ambitious building projects were shuttered and thousands in the construction industry lost their jobs.

For those lucky enough to have kept their jobs in the casinos, gaming is still profitable, even though the number of tourists has decreased (due in part to travel restrictions by Beijing and the curtailing of gambling by PRC officials). Direct gaming tax revenue doubled from 2006 to 2008 to nearly $5 billion and many of the Macau government’s 20,000 employees can expect a pay raise this year. For the slums in Fátima Parish, things will likely remain the same.

The hotel Lan Kwai Fong. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
It remains to be seen whether Chief Executive-elect Chui will be able to oversee the level of prosperity heralded during the last decade, or indeed whether Macau can remain a global gambling Mecca. For some, surely, things could be worse. Down the street from my apartment, I recently happened upon the opening party for a new hotel. On the street where I stood, looking rather pathetic with my mouth agape, throngs of people queued for admittance, while glittery VIP couples seemed to prance in slow motion as they made their way to the front of the line. Up above us, the silhouettes of a dozen voluptuous women—paid performers—gyrated in the windows of the new hotel. A powerful sound system blasted Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” throughout the neighborhood, inviting all of Macau to find “someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.”

This fall, Dustin Wright will begin his doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Recommended readings on Macau:

Lucky for us, Hong Kong University Press just republished many of Austin Coates’ informative and immensely enjoyable books on Macau: City of Broken Promises (fiction), A Macao Narrative, and Macao and the British: 1637-1842 Prelude to Hong Kong.

For a general background on Macau, check out Jonathan Porter’s Macau : The Imaginary City : Culture and Society, 1577 to Present (Westview Press, 1999).

Cathryn H. Clayton, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii and a prominent scholar on Macau, has written the forthcoming Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Atlantic correspondent James Fallows’ take on Macau.

César Guillén Nuñez, art historian and Research Fellow at the Macau-based Ricci Institute, recently wrote a wonderful book entitled, Macao's Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009).

[1] Austin Coates, A Macau Narrative (Hong Kong: Heinemann Education Books [Asia] Ltd, 1978), p. 105.
[2] Wang Zeng Yang, “Unveiling a Cultural Dialogue,” in Lucy M. Cohen and Iêda Siquera Wiarda (eds.), Macau: Cultural Dialogue Towards a New Millennium (USA: Xlibris Corporation, 2004), p. 17.
[3] D. Y. Yuan, Chinese Immigration and Emigration: A Population Study of Macau (University of Macau, 2000), p. 11.

Brought to You by the People’s Republic of The Onion

By Haiyan Lee

America's finest news source The Onion has a new owner! Since last week, readers have been bombarded with the good tiding, from the modified masthead, logo, and tagline, to news headlines, editorials, audio and video clips, and ads, lots of ads. The new owner goes by the appetizing name of Yu Wan Mei 鱼完美 Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Group, supposedly a Chinese conglomerate from the inland province of Sichuan. The corporation specializes in fish by-products salvaged from the “ocean’s bounty.” Some of its finer samples are “Broiled Shark Gums,” “Multi-Flavor Variety Pack Of Pickled Fish Cloaca,” “Lightning Power Monkfish Cerebral Fluid Energy Drink,” “Mr. Steve's Safe And Natural Rhinoceros-Cure For The Inferior Male,” and “Yu Wan Mei Miscellaneous Flavor Paste.”

But, as the YWM homepage proclaims in bold letters, the corporation is “diversifying into myriad subsidiaries” such as “Szu-Maul Lethal Injection Truck And Van Manufacturing,” “Speedee Slab Quick-Setting Concrete Consolidated,” “Jhonson & Jhonson Baby's Shampow,” “Yu Wanmei EZ Home Foreclosure Program,” and “Amalgamated Chinatowns of America, Inc.” The new owner is pushy, to say the least. Every news and non-news item in the paper comes with at least one YWM product placement reference. Ads containing shibboleths in simulated non-grammatical English (“Glorious Fish By-Product Make for Long Life, Good Fortune”) rudely bisect or multiply interrupt any and all reports. At a more subliminal level, the end of every text is marked with the Chinese character for fish. The video clips go overboard with animated YWM icons and messages flashing across the screen and with the anchors blending YWM commercials effortlessly into their tabloid-style interviews. The Onion has positively turned fishy.

No savvy Onion reader should be fooled by this non-too-subtle effort at mocking the sorry state of the publishing industry and the corporate takeover of the media in contemporary America. No one, really, should even be surprised that a fictive Chinese corporation is the villain of this imaginary apocalypse. After all, wasn’t GM’s Hummer just sold to an obscure Chinese company called Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd.? Bizarre as it may have sounded, that piece of news shouldn’t have surprised too many either. For better or for worse, China has been on Americans’ mind for quite some time—at least those Americans who have been paying attention to the intricate linkage between the Chinese compulsion to save and the subprime mortgage crisis that has brought the American economy to its knees, to the chattering class ratcheting up the specter of “China rising,” to the media coverage of the Beijing Olympics and the ethnic riots, to news stories about poisonous toothpaste, carcinogenic toys, and tainted milk powder.

In the new millennium, China’s has mostly shed its Cold War cartoonish image as an evil Communist regime that hates freedom and democracy but cannot stop its citizens from loving those beautiful ideals, at least not in their basements (they must have basements where they can write subversive poetry, build little replicas of the Statue of Liberty, and dream of rising up against the gerontocrats ensconced behind the Gate of Heavenly Peace). Today, the Chinese are viewed with suspicion not as ideological fanatics (that role has been taken over by Islamic fundamentalists) but as relentless profit-seekers bound by neither law nor conscience. Thus a Chinese company coming out of nowhere to take a stab at acquiring a piece of what was once the pinnacle of American industrial achievements was truly a remarkable event whose significance could not be adequately marked by mainstream media trying to steer clear of fear-mongering. Thus it has fallen on a cabal of professional satirists to spell out its full implications.

It is commonly said that humor does not translate easily because it is deeply entrenched in the nitty-gritty of a given cultural and social milieu. It requires sustained immersion in local knowledge for the cues to be picked up and savored and for the punch line to hit home. The Onion has owed its success to mostly in-jokes designed for the well-trained ears and eyes of a stratum of Americans very much tuned in to the shifting landscapes of American culture and politics and yet disgusted with the many absurdities unfailingly trotted out by politicians as well as an assortment of celebrities. That we now have a China-themed issue of The Onion is an unmistakable indication of how much China has become part of American life and perhaps the American psyche as well.

But what exactly is it about China to which The Onion is directing its mordant sense of humor and irony? And if China is no more than a foil, what is it about the American self that is also being skewered? Let’s begin with the mock-announcement of the transfer of ownership. Couched in the hoary voice (“news-paper,” “owner-ship,” “any-way”) of the paper’s 141-year-old “publisher emeritus” T. Herman Zweibel, the piece is strewn with racial slurs evocative of the times of Fu Manchu. Mr. Zweibel speaks of “China-men” crawling out of their “dank hut” to extend their “clammy clutch” into the Western world, getting what they wanted with “infernal bowing and other assorted chinky-dinkery” plus “an appropriately absurd parcel of riches.” But the real bogeyman turns out to be Mr. Zweibel himself, who casually lets drop the paper’s inglorious origin: his ancestors founded it to fleece “its porridge-brained readers out of as much precious capital as could be wrung from their grubby, desperately toiling fingers.” Sharing his ancestors’ profound contempt for readers and journalists alike, he is sick of trying to keep up the pretense of providing objective reporting for the benefit of an informed citizenry.

What is at first blush a spoof of old-fashioned American racism turns out to be a savage attack on the profanation of the profession of journalism by rapacious capitalists. Still, the racial slurs pile on, and the announcement ends with Mr. Zweibel wishing the “whimpering clods” who call themselves readers good luck with the new owner, who he promises will “surely dizzy you into stupefied obedience with their unnatural black Orient arts.”

Is this funny? Does playing on unsavory, threadbare racial stereotypes tickle the American funny bone? The Onion does not seem so confident about the comic longevity of such old hat gags. Elsewhere in the paper, good old Americanisms about the “Chinaman” are banished in favor of a subtler brand of humor that invokes a different mythology: a China run by a ruthless and humorless authoritarian government. It’s a government that has maintained its grip on power through unapologetic censorship and by feeding its populace falsehoods about itself and the outside world. It imprisons and butchers its citizens if they dare to grumble a bit or even take it to the streets.

Alarmingly, this recluse of a country has in recent decades steadily opened itself up and joined the global capitalist game without—aggravatingly enough—playing by the rules. It is like the genie let out of the bottle, gaining in size and menace in the blink of an eye and manifesting no intention of doing our biddings. For three decades now it has been sewing our clothes and shoes, stuffing our children’s toys, filling our homes with cheap gadgets, packing our canned food, even financing our deficit spending at both the individual and national levels, but it doesn’t seem to want to share our values and ideals. It doesn’t seem to want anything from us other than our dollar, and maybe a few Hollywood blockbusters—not something we are unanimously proud of. What to make of such a “frienemy”?

Niall Ferguson has given a name to this uneasy interdependency: “Chimerica,” a pair of Siamese twins joined at the hip and yet feuding and straining to turn their backs on each other. Humor is one way to diffuse the tension and diminish the perceived threat of the other. The Onion at least gets this much across to its readers, with a wink and a nudge: Look, the Chinese have been stuck with a ridiculous control-freak of a government that blithely carries on its hilariously flawed propaganda blitz thinking that it’s cleverly pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. Now they’re trying the same bag of tricks on us. Unfortunately, we Americans are defenseless against the onslaught because we have been disarmed by their cheap wares and capital infusion. They have bought us out, literally. In capitalism, money talks. So what can we do but surrender to their at once bombastic and insinuating messages, commercial as well as political? So here we go (and brace yourselves):

*China is a police state: there is no rule of law, no freedom of information; its media serve up lies, half-truths, and illiberal prejudices. If the oligarchic Party had its way, there would be only 12 websites altogether (“Internet Adds 12th Website”), with two of them being YuWanMei.com and ConfuciusQuotes.net (one imagines the latter site full of such gems of wisdom as “Confucius say, man who sit on red hot stove shall rise again,” though the actually existing ConfuciusQuotes.net doesn’t appear, unlike YuWanMei.com, to be a companion mock-site of The Onion). An Internet user registers total satisfaction with the extent of his virtual universe: "Who knew that someday we'd be able to carry forth our rich cultural traditions and promote the ethical norms of a socialist society, all at the touch of a button?" If you click on the editorial piece intriguingly entitled “The Internet Allows For A Free Exchange of Unmitigated Information,” a stern warning page springs up on your screen with the following message:

Secure Connection Failed
You have made a grave error.
(Error code: sec_error_cn_dissident_invalid)
Access to this page has been denied for your benefit by the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China.
The State suggests: www.yuwanmei.com, www.mps.gov.cn, http://bit.ly/jqfPe
* Your ISP has been noted.

*China is a bully, especially vis-à-vis Taiwan, which it regards as a break-away province. In “Toddler Chokes To Death On Plastic Taiwanese-Made Toy,” it tries, preposterously enough, to unload its toy scandal on the de facto island state that has over the years built a reputation for the reliability of its exports: “The cowardly and disloyal American-child-killing territory of Taiwan—properly known as Chinese Taipei—whose people and illegitimate government could be annihilated at any moment, has not yet issued an apology for murdering this gentle child with its hazardous toy product.”

*China does not play fair. In “Intellectual Property Rights As Fleeting As The Scent Of Jasmine, Mayfly's Wing In Autumn,” we are treated to a Daoist meditation on reality and illusion. Ever heard of the sage Zhuangzi waking up from a nap wondering if he was Zhuangzi who had just had a dream about a butterfly or if he was a Butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuangzi? Ever tried to apply that piece of ancient Chinese wisdom to our conceited world? Here’s the Chinese (or is it YWM?) showing you how to do it.

*China is a peculiar hybrid of arrogance, ignorance, and intolerance. In “Weakling President Asks Imaginary Man In Sky To Bless Nation,” it’s bad enough that the president should ask “a pretend man who lives in the clouds” to watch over his nation, “even more incomprehensible, sources said, is that hundreds of millions of Americans openly worship the all-knowing invisible man—who apparently observes the world's events from atop his perch in outer space—without fear of mockery, shame, or violent government reprisal.” Clearly, the Chinese have never heard of religion or spirituality and can’t even recognize a figure of speech. In “Grandfather Disrespected In Own Home,” an American family are chided for deficiency of filial piety, as evidenced in the scant attention they pay to the patriarch’s “expert counsel on matters ranging from home maintenance to the best methods for attaining low-cost airfare to Florida.” Worse, the daughter-in-law dare deny the old man his request for a second slice of pie, forgetting that “to this day she has not produced a single male heir.”

You get the idea.

The kick one gets out of mocking one’s opponent can be delectable. But when the opponent is one’s (evil) twin, there’s always the nagging doubt that the self is implicated. The Onion offers a few soothing salves for injured American pride. In “U.S. Hunger For Fish Byproducts Not As Strong As First Imagined,” YWM is dismayed by evidence showing that “the American palette is far too unrefined and pedestrian to appreciate such delicacies as ground gas bladders, lymphoid tissue, and fresh gill paste.” Americans have discerning tastes after all and have not entirely lost their gastronomical independence, which bodes well for keeping the browbeating Chinese at bay in other, more vital areas. In the “Infographic” feature called “The Following Are Examples Of American Weakness,” Americans are reminded of their virtues and strengths by means of a slanderous and uncomprehending litany of defects: “Gymnasts are old, bulky and without grace”; “When people are permitted to so loudly discuss their rights, it is impossible to sit down and enjoy a peaceful Fish Time”; “Unwieldy system of checks, balances”; and so on. A beautiful landscape picture (the Rockies?) is given this caption: “Clear American Sky A Constant Reminder Of Industrial Inferiority.”

What makes China such a delicious target of the lampoon artists and such an obliging foil for the American ego? If humor plays on perceived incongruity, then China very much has it coming, what with its bloated self-image and its bumbling presence on the international stage. The Chinese have an excellent sense of humor too, even under the most austere and repressive circumstances, as Guo Qitao’s collection of Cultural Revolution era jokes testify. But satire, with its critical thrust against the powers that be, has always had to tread a very fine line. In the People’s Daily’s comic supplement Satire and Humor 讽刺与幽默 (inaugurated in 1979), the majority of the cartoons and comic strips are of a eulogistic nature, inconceivable as it might be. Entries with a bit of a bite usually target social ills and official corruption (the kind that is being openly prosecuted). High politics is strictly off-limits.

For all its avowed atheism, China has many sacred cows. This alone is an irresistible temptation for American satirists who thrive on brinksmanship with taboos of any kind. Politics has always been the most legitimate and prized target of caricature and its rich and inexhaustible supply of joke butts have sustained the careers of legions of satirists and catapulted a few to national stardom. Comedians-cum-journalists are national heroes: think of Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, Stephen Colbert, and Michael Moore. Politicians who are at the receiving end of their caustic commentaries are apparently eager to appear on their shows, as if to be a good politician entails not only the ability to withstand barbed wit, but also the proof that one knows how to deflate one’s own pretentions and does not imagine oneself an uppity elite who is above the jesting of the common folk. Politics, in other words, has little of the mysticism or sacrality that typically shrouds it in authoritarian countries.

There is another aspect to Chinese politics that lends it to well to parody: theatricality. This is of course closely related to the mystified nature of political power in China, where pomp and ceremony is how power presents itself to the people and where reverence, obedience, fear, and enchantment are the proper response to the displays of power, not derisive laughter. Politics amounts to a theatrical spectacle, a ritualistic enactment of what James Scott calls “public transcript.” It is a drama that commands participation, willingly or unwillingly, from the rulers and ruled alike. Both have their roles to inhabit and their scripts to act out; whatever foolish or insubordinate thoughts they might harbor in private (their “hidden transcripts”) matter very little.

American politics, by contrast, leans on an ethos of authenticity. Politicians are expected to bare their bosoms to the voters, to speak their minds under any circumstances, to be his or her true self in public as in private, to show emotion when emotion is called for, and above all, to convince the electorate that they mean what they say and are not just going through the motion. They must come off as “genuine” and “sincere,” not a phony robot manipulated by strategists or merely refracting public expectations.

Against this backdrop, the Chinese style of politics can strike a casual American observer as hopelessly hypocritical, a sort of gigantic shell game in which none of the players believe in what they are doing and nonetheless keep on with the charade. All that playacting, the disconnect between speech and action, between belief and practice, is an open invitation to mockery. (In that light, American politics is not without its own theatrical dimensions, which is why its comic quotient is also very high.) Theatrical politics makes for good satire because satire is theater too: what are speaking tongue-in-cheek, punning, impersonating, and ventriloquizing if not theatrical arts? Who is a better match for the mealy-mouthed politician than the slick-tongued comedian? (One can only wonder why it should have taken the Minnesotans that long to send Al Franken to the U.S. Senate.)

Judging from the fun The Onion has been having with the China motifs, we would not be exaggerating in saying that China is a godsend to the comedic profession: an oversized arriviste on the global scene now preaching like a forbearing Confucian sage, now haranguing like a self-righteous commissar, now gushing like an overzealous salesman. Who among the funny set could have made that up?

Haiyan Lee teaches Chinese literature and civilization at Stanford University. She can be reached at haiyan@stanford.edu.

Screenshot of The Onion from NPR.

A Cultural Symbol Passes from the Scene: Ji Xianlin, Not Michael Jackson

By Timothy B. Weston

It’s been moving to watch the response in China to the July 11 death of renowned scholar, Ji Xianlin (1911-2009). While Ji’s unsurprising departure at the ripe old age of 98 has not brought quite the same flood tide of emotion and cultural stock taking in China as Michael Jackson’s completely unexpected death a few weeks earlier at age 50 has in the United States and around the world, the way the venerable scholar is being remembered in Beijing is nevertheless remarkable. Long lines of people wishing to pay their last respects waited for hours to gain entrance to a memorial ceremony held on the Beijing University campus where Ji taught, the press was full of tributes, and Communist Party leaders were very public in the honors they paid to the man from academe. In the United States it is hard to imagine the death of an elderly scholar, of a humanist who worked on the ancient past no less, ever attracting anything approaching the level of attention that Ji’s passing has in China.


Ji Xianlin and Michael Jackson shared nothing in common except the coincidence of the timing of their deaths and the fact that in passing both were mourned as departed cultural symbols. Frankly, as the hysteria over Michael Jackson’s death has continued to pulsate through American society I have found it refreshing to follow the treatment that Ji Xianlin’s high-minded life has received in China. I feel this way even though it’s clear that the Chinese Communist Party’s highly public paeans to the deceased scholar have not been free of political considerations and while also acknowledging that Michael Jackson’s life and career certainly merit serious reflection and social commentary. Still, when looking at the way Ji’s death has been treated as compared with Jackson’s, and at what the two cultural symbols meant to their times and places, I find myself more drawn to the values and maturity on display in China than to the self-referential, entertainer-obsessed conversation that Jackson’s death has occasioned in the United States (even if much of that conversation has been about the sadness and oddity of Jackson’s life).

Ji Xianlin was without doubt an outstanding scholar whose career was noteworthy for its singular achievements and cosmopolitan dimensions. Originally a student of Western literature at Qinghua University, in 1935 Ji traveled to Germany for foreign study. At the University of Göttingen he moved in a dramatically new direction, choosing to major in Sanskrit and other ancient Indian languages under the direction of Ernst Waldschmidt and Emil Sieg. Ji received his Ph.D. in Germany and after World War II returned to China where he took a position at Beijing University and founded the Department of Eastern Languages. He chaired that department for the next three decades and built it into one of the most important academic departments at Beida and China’s premier center for the study of Eastern languages.

Ji’s greatest scholarly accomplishments came in the realm of the history of Indian Buddhism and comparative linguistics. According to his former student Zhang Baosheng, now a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Beijing University, Ji’s academic achievements represented the next wave of greatness within the long, proud tradition of Chinese evidential scholarship after the great contribution made by Ji’s patron, the celebrated historian Chen Yinke, who helped bring Ji to Beida in the first place. Whereas Chen Yinke used literary works as a means of verifying history, Ji Xianlin pioneered a method of using comparative linguistics to verify historical events and to track changes over time. Ji’s scholarly findings attracted international attention and made him a world leader in his field; over the course of his career he was awarded major academic prizes in India, Iran and Japan.

In addition to pioneering new methodologies and creating new knowledge, Ji Xianlin also held important administrative positions in the later part of his life. Following the Cultural Revolution he was called upon to help re-build major Chinese academic institutions ravaged over the previous decade. In 1978 he became vice president of Beijing University (which position he held until 1984) and also director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ South Asia Research Institute. During his career he also served as chairman of various professional organizations, such as the Chinese Foreign Literature Association, the Chinese South Asian Association, and the Chinese Language Society.


Ji Xianlin’s achievements within academe distinguish him as one of the towering humanistic scholars of the Chinese twentieth century, as an intellectual whose name deserves to be mentioned, as it was again in a tribute piece recently published in Beijing, along with luminaries such as Chen Duxiu, Chen Yinke, Hu Shi, Li Dazhao, Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Wang Guowei, and Zhao Yuanren. But Ji’s career, centered as it was in the esoteric academic field of Indology, which few people understand or appreciate, cannot account for the long lines of people wishing to pay their last respects at Beijing University nor for the tributes that poured in from highly placed people within the academic, publishing and cultural spheres upon news of his death. Likewise, Ji’s scholarly accomplishments and official positions at key academic institutions do not explain why the Chinese press has carried so much discussion of the scholar’s life, why Communist Party leaders Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, Wu Bangguo and Xi Jinping sent flower wreathes and offered condolences upon news of his death, or finally why, on July 19, his corpse draped in the red flag of the People’s Republic (Ji joined the party in 1956) and laid out for a final viewing, other top officials, including Wen Jiabao, Jia Qinglin, Li Chanchun, and Li Keqiang, showed up to make their farewells in person.


To understand why Ji Xianlin’s passing has struck such a chord it is necessary, I believe, to recognize that in his later years he had become a living symbol of the ideal Chinese scholar, and as such of a type of person who it is ever more difficult to find in today’s fast-paced, money-crazed Chinese society. Here was a man who had been born and raised in the old society, who knew the classics, who had attainted great fame and yet who did not attempt to convert his glory into power, wealth, or celebrity, who in fact talked down his achievements and continued to work hard at his research as long as he was able. Ji was not first and foremost a Confucian philosopher but he nevertheless came to be seen as a kind of secular Confucian sage who personified the committed life of the scholar. His integrity and wisdom, then, not his outstanding scholarly achievements, led to his being recognized as a “national treasure” (国宝), though he himself rejected such a label.

While the world around him buzzed first with Maoist revolutionary fervor and then with Western-style modernization, Ji Xianlin, identified with the secluded garden campus that is Beijing University, remained committed to his study of the ancient, non-Western past. He devoted his life not to the practical but to historical discovery, and in so doing was adamant in claiming that civilizational values other than those associated with the modern West deserve to be known, celebrated, and even selectively embraced as humanity collectively makes its way forward in time. The steadiness of conviction that informed Ji Xianlin’s life, and the messages he derived from his life’s work, proved highly reassuring during a period of unceasing and disorienting change.

In his humility and seriousness of purpose it is hard to imagine a greater contrast to Michael Jackson, the fallen American cultural symbol. Whereas Jackson forever reinvented himself and never ceased turning his life into spectacle, Ji occupied a well-established scholarly role with grace and distinction. Jackson was all artifice, Ji not the least bit affected. Jackson appears never to have known who he was, Ji to have possessed a remarkable inner compass and knowledge of self. The scholar lived simply, dressed in the clothes of a common worker, and was available, kind and respectful to one and all, regardless of social station. As those themes come up again and again in the articles that appeared after Ji Xianlin’s death I sense in them a nostalgia for the ideal of a life defined by the quest for pure knowledge and self improvement, for an age when those ideals were aspired to by society’s best and brightest.

For Chinese intellectuals Ji Xianlin meant more still. To them he was a hero who used (and so risked) his reputation to speak out on issues of concern to all. Like most of his colleagues, Ji suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, during that period he secretly worked to produce a brilliant Chinese-language translation of the Ramayana from the original Sanskrit, an act of bravery and scholarly devotion for which he later became celebrated. When after the Cultural Revolution he was named to high administrative posts at Beijing University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences he became one of the great survivors of the age and a symbol of the indomitable spirit of truth-seeking Chinese intellectuals.


In the mid-1980s Ji Xianlin added to that reputation when he published an essay calling for a new and more favorable appraisal of Hu Shi, who of course had been vilified during the Cultural Revolution. Ji’s point was that whatever Hu’s political mistakes, his contributions to the study of Chinese literature stood on their own and needed to be recognized. Not everything should be politicized, Ji maintained, a message that was widely praised within Chinese intellectual circles at the time. In the late 1990s, with the publication of his widely read and highly acclaimed account of his own experience during the Cultural Revolution, Memoirs from the Cowshed (牛棚杂亿), Ji’s reputation for speaking the truth in a courageous and thoughtful manner was deepened still further.

While it is impossible to know with certainty, it would seem that the Communist Party lavished so much praise on Ji Xianlin upon his death not only because many of its top leaders recognized his scholarly achievements and admired him personally (Wen Jiabao is even said to have referred to Ji as his mentor) but also because in embracing him and what he stood for they were able to communicate to Chinese intellectuals on the eve of the all-important Sixtieth Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China that they share heroes in common, that they speak a common language. Unlike American political leaders, most of whom do not feel compelled to demonstrate any cultural competency whatsoever, top political leaders in China desire to be taken seriously by intellectuals and to display to the public at large that they are not only working to protect and strengthen the country but also that they prize the scholarly custodians of the Chinese past. Culture, history and politics are intertwined. So to bind Ji Xianlin to the political leadership in a clear way, the party press went out of its way to identify Ji as a great Chinese patriot, as a figure who dedicated his life to his people and to his country’s improvement. In these ways it was useful for the Communist Party and its official media organs to mark Ji’s passing and to extol his virtues.

Finally, Ji Xianlin happened to pass at the very moment when the sad and murderous recent ethnic violence in Xinjiang was filling the media in China and around the world. As the fractiousness of contemporary Chinese society, at least one part of it, was on display and impossible to deny (even if its causes will long be debated), and as Party leaders scrambled to contain the damage, an orderly period of mourning for a great man, a great Communist with popular appeal, was an attractive possibility.

And here Ji Xianlin’s worldview and unique scholarly contributions proved particularly meaningful, for one of the things that Ji stood for most powerfully was the idea that, to quote Ji himself: “Cultural exchange is the main driv[ing force] for humankind's progress. Only by learning from each other's strong points to make up for shortcomings can people constantly progress, the ultimate target of which is to achieve a kind of Great Harmony.” Not only should the Chinese people admire Ji Xianlin for his great scholarly achievements and his integrity, the official obituaries seemed to suggest, they should also realize that he stood for cultural tolerance, for the idea that only by accepting and interacting with one another can all people (the nation) prosper. Harmony as the goal—something Hu Jintao and Ji Xianlin, the great sage, could agree on.

Timothy Weston teaches in the department of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a participant in the National Committee on US-China Relations' Public Intellectuals Program and author of The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929 (UC Press, 2004).

All photos from Xinhua: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

The Xinjiang Riots: Tried Paradigms, Fresh Tensions

By James Leibold

The mainstream media, both Western and Chinese, seem to be struggling to make sense of the deadly riots that broke out in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi last week. Well-worn explanations on both sides have largely failed to grasp the complexities behind this new, unprecedented wave of mass communal violence in China. Not since the dying days of the Manchu Qing empire has China witnessed this sort of spontaneous ethnically-based violence.


With initial headlines like “Chinese riot police, Muslims clash in northwestern city,” “China in deadly crackdown after Uighurs go on the rampage,” and “Uighurs cling to life in People’s hospital as China’s wounds weep,” the foreign media painted the usual picture of the Chinese Communist Party and its security apparatuses brutally cracking down on the repressed and helpless minorities.

In much of the early reporting the emphasis lay on “the heavy-handed use of force by the Chinese security forces” and the subsequent tightening of media and Internet control, rather than the mob rule and racial retribution being doled out by Uighur and Han youth alike. When searching for answers to this wanton and impulsive brutality, the foreign media wheeled out its usual critique of state-sponsored violence against the Uighurs, Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in China.

Yet, this time, many of the dead and wounded appear to have been Han rather than ethnic minorities. The confusion surrounding this misidentification caused the London Evening Standard, among other media outlets, to use a photo of two blood-soaked Han women to invocate the “blood and defiance” and “Tiananmen’s spirit” of a group of Uighur women who confronted security forces several days after the initial incident.

Seeking to counter this familiar criticism, the official Chinese media went on the front foot; and, in sharp contrast to its handling of last year's unrest in Tibet, immediately reported the Urumqi violence in graphic detail, hoping to define rather than suppress the message both domestically and internationally. Yet, its coverage provided no fresh explanations, reverting instead to familiar clichés and slogans.

The Chinese media was quick to stress how unidentified “rioters” and “outlaws,” “controlled and instigated from abroad” by “the “Uighur Dalai Lama” Rebiya Kadeer, unleashed “the most inhumane atrocities too horrible to look at.” Behind headlines like “Recalling the nightmare: witnesses’ account of Xinjiang riot,” and “Ravaged by riot, Xinjiang’s capital in horror,” the Chinese media sought to expose those “evil” and “external” forces that left Urumqi “blood tainted,” while stressing the “heroic deeds” of all ethnic groups in China to uphold “national unity and social stability” in the face of international criticism and outside meddling.


While details remain sketchy, eyewitness accounts tell a different story: the outbreak of spontaneous communal violence between China’s Han ethnic majority and the increasingly marginalized Uighur inhabitants of Xinjiang. On the evening of July 5th, several hundred Uighur youths went on a bloody rampage following a peaceful demonstration over a separate incident of ethnic violence at a Guangdong toy factory. The results, according to Chinese government figures, was the destruction of thousands of dollars worth of property, the death of nearly two hundred innocent civilians and another thousand injured.

In the days that followed, bands of roving Han vigilantes armed with kitchen knives, hammers, metal pipes and other improvised weapons sought to mete out revenge in the Uighur suburbs of the city. Both this incident and last year’s unrest in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and other Tibetan areas represent a worrying new wave of ethnic violence (not only physical violence on the streets of cities like Lhasa and Urumqi, but also virtual violence on the numerous ethnically-based blogging sites on the Chinese Internet). And here the well-worn paradigms of state repression and foreign incitement conceal more than they reveal.

The root causes behind this spike in communal tension are far more complex and multidimensional than the media would have us believe. It is true that state-sponsored Han migration has culturally and economically marginalized the once majority Uighur population of Xinjiang—a situation that has been made worse by the recent global economic downturn.

But many Han migrants are themselves unhappy, and they are increasingly pointing a finger at the state’s extensive affirmative action policies (youhui zhengce) that provides special economic, cultural and educational benefits to the minorities. These policies, they claim, only serve to mollycoddle the “backward” and “simple” minorities, while rendering the naturally superior Han second-class citizens. Caught in-between these increasingly polarized and agitated ethnic communities is the Chinese state, which, rather than orchestrating the brutal oppression of the non-Han minorities, finds itself increasingly powerless to stop the spiralling circle of ethnic hatred which its policies helped to foster in the first place.

In a recent online report on the violence in the Tibetan region last year, the progressive, Beijing-based Gongmeng (Open Constitution Initiative) think tank explored some of the major social causes behind this wellspring of violent discontent. The report claimed that the rapid (almost dizzying) pace of state-directed change in frontier regions like Tibet and Xinjiang has failed to bring any real benefit to the vast majority of the minority inhabitants in these regions, instead resulting in growing income disparity, high education dropout rates, growing unemployment and underemployment, cultural dislocation and a growing sense of powerlessness. While asserting that “the state’s major preferential policies and support have not been of any effective benefit to the main body of Tibetan people,” the report also speaks of the rise of a new Tibetan “aristocracy,” whose legitimacy rests on central government affiliation rather than traditional clan or religious ties, making it easier for this new elite to turn a blind eye to the negative social consequences of imposed modernization.

The report’s authors argue that the rich tradition of “Han departmentalism” (hanzu benwei zhuyi), which seeks to compartmentalize different ethnic communities under a hollow ideology of Confucian harmony, continues to hinder effective political responses to these problems. The structure of governance in autonomous regions like Tibet and Xinjiang means that, on the one hand, minority cadres have carved out “deep-rooted local power elite networks” and seek to protect their personal interests by blaming all social unrest on “foreign forces” as “fig leaves to conceal their mistakes in governance and to repress social discontent,” while on the other hand, continued discrimination and social marginalization among ordinary, non-Han minorities hinders their identification with the PRC state and any shared concept of nationhood.


In seeking to understand this troubling rise in ethnic-based violence in China, we need to look beyond the usual bogeymen at the increasingly torn fabric of Reform Era Chinese society. In the end, the over twenty years of rapid economic growth has unleashed as many demons as it has benefits—evident in the increasing number of ordinary citizens who are turning to ethnic profiling and violence to vent their shared frustrations. The result is a burgeoning level of internal racism that should concern us all.

Dr James Leibold is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Asian Studies at La Trobe University and author of Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). His current research focuses on contemporary expressions of Han racial nationalism on the Internet and recent developments in the PRC’s minority policy and the broader discourse of multiculturalism in Reform Era China.

Tsingtao Beer: A Complex Brew

By Robert Bickers

‘What are we to drink?’ asked a British doctor in Shanghai in 1867, reflecting on the precautions needed to maintain health in the sweltering city. His answer, as Shanghai water was too filthy a solution, was simple: beer. For ‘7 or 8 months of the year’ he wrote, bitter was ‘as wholesome a drink as we could have’. Its medicinal properties were, I rather suspect, far from the minds of the inhabitants of the new military garrisons established in north China after the late 1890s ‘scramble for concessions’, and the Boxer rising and war. They wanted the relief only a cool pilsener could bring them. To slate that thirst, a new brewery was established in the German naval colony at Qingdao, and therein lie the roots of China’s favourite tipple, and its most visible global brand: Tsingtao Beer.

The original brewery

Therein too, lie the roots of current anxieties in China about the sale of a 19 per cent stake in the Tsingtao Brewery Co. by Anheuser-Busch InBev to Japanese brewers Asahi, giving them an almost 27% stake in the firm (and a relatively easy springboard from which to take full control). Sketches of the firm nearly always note that its origins were as a German company, and it’s a badge of pride in the company’s own publicity materials, not least those around its centenary celebrations in 2003. But it’s actually more interesting than that, and more revealing of the earlier world of transnational business activity in pre-communist China.

For Tsingtao Beer was never formally German (in fact, until 1915 it was not even Tsingtao Beer). The Anglo-German Brewery Co. Ltd was established in August 1903 as a British company, under Hong Kong ordinances, and was chaired at Shanghai by a Scotsman, with (by 1915) 60 per cent German, 40 per cent British and other share ownership (including 5 per cent owned by the French religious orders). Of course, the Manager and the Brewmaster were German, and the inability to run the brewery without a German brewmaster was why it failed to present it as entire free of German interests in 1915, and so fell into Japanese hands with the blessing of British diplomats. Those diplomats were fed up with dealing with the difficulties of separating out such very often closely (and cosily) intertwined British and German interests in the treaty ports. Although hundreds flocked home to fight, many other Britons and Germans in China mostly found the Great War a Great Inconvenience. Who had hosted the members of the (British) Shanghai Club while it was being rebuilt? The German Club Concordia. Whose nationals formed the second largest cohort of European staff in the Chinese Maritime customs: the Germans. Disentangling these ties – of habit, sentiment, capital -- and encouraging proper wartime hate, proved tricky.

A fountain at the current brewery

So Tsingtao Beer’s early history is a classic case of the transnational nature of the foreign enterprise in treaty-era China, in this case, the match of German expertise, German and British capital, and British law (and thirsty German soldiers and sailors in Qingdao). The old brewery is now a museum, and well worth a visit – and you don’t need to leave thirsty.

Robert Bickers, a professor of history at the University of Bristol, is currently working on The Scramble for China, a history of the foreign presence in China from the 1830s onwards, which has involved fieldwork at the Qingdao brewery, amongst other places.

The Chinese Typewriter

Tom Mullaney, who will be familiar to regular followers of this site thanks to the podcasts he's done for us (such as this one on the 1989 protests and this one on Last Days of Old Beijing), recently mentioned that he is currently writing a history of the Chinese typewriter, as actual and imagined object.

He sent this piece introducing the subject, which moves between popular culture and the history of technology (how often are rapper MC Hammer, IBM engineers, diplomats from China, and Homer Simpson alluded to in a single story?), while illuminating some of the directions that thinking about the challenges involved in creating machines capable of reproducing Chinese characters have led:


By Thomas S. Mullaney

Propelled to international stardom by his multi-platinum single “U Can’t Touch This,” MC Hammer is perhaps not the first person one thinks of when studying Western stereotypes about China. Remarkably, however, the music video accompanying his 1990 hit featured one bit of fancy footwork that has helped perpetuate a distorted view of China dating back more than one hundred years. Known as the “Chinese typewriter,” the dance features MC Hammer side-stepping in rapid, frenetic movements, choreography that would gain immense popularity to become one of the defining dances of the early nineties.

Why the Chinese Typewriter? Hammer’s dance, the idea went, was supposed to mimic the alien virtuosity of a Chinese typist as he navigates what Hammer assumed must be an absurdly massive keyboard crowded with tens of thousands of characters.

Whereas the Oakland-born artist may be credited with bringing parachute pants into mainstream culture, the same cannot be said of his ideas regarding our Pacific neighbor. The Chinese typewriter has been an object of ridicule in the West since its inception at the turn of the century.

For over a hundred years, writers in the United States and Europe have derived a unique sense of cultural and technological superiority by portraying the apparatus as absurdly large, painfully slow, and prohibitively complex.

Others have simply assumed that the machine never existed—that it is a mechanical impossibility, and thus, that China is incapable of reaching a level of modernity equal to the West for the simple reason that Chinese characters are inherently incompatible with modern technology.

Contrary to media representations, however, the past century has witnessed the development of nearly five dozen different models of Chinese typewriter, each one representing an ever more sophisticated attempt at solving a puzzle that makes the more familiar QWERTY typewriter look like child’s play: the puzzle of how to fit a non-alphabetic language containing tens of thousands of characters on an apparatus of a manageable size and a user-friendly design. Despite the complexity of this challenge and the brilliance of the solutions devised, it seems that the West has remained incapable of taking the Chinese typewriter seriously.

Two of the earliest known Chinese typewriters were designed around the turn of the century, one by a Chinese man living in the United States and the other by an American man living in China.

The first of these was operated in San Francisco Chinatown, and was based on a variation of the longstanding practice of Chinese typesetting. Encompassing roughly five thousand of the language’s most frequently used characters, the machine incorporated a large, flat tray upon which metal typeface were arranged in accordance with a categorization system found in Chinese dictionaries of the day.

The second machine was invented by the Presbyterian missionary Devello Sheffield, whose machine also contained roughly five thousand characters. One of the only differences, and a minor one at that, was that Sheffield’s machine was based on a circular rather than rectangular configuration.

Despite the essential similarity of these two early designs, journalists reserved praise for the Westerner’s machine and scorn for that of his Chinese counterpart. Sheffield’s device was hailed as “remarkable,” “ingenious,” and the “most complicated and wonderful typewriter in the world,” while the machine in California was viciously lampooned by the San Francisco Examiner in a racist cartoon portraying the inventor as an ape-like “Chinaman” shouting incomprehensible jibberish to a group of similarly animalistic operators. As one observer complained, the “smashing and banging of the machine and the fierce shouts of the working force suggest a riot in a boiler factory.”

Just over a decade later, a patent for a new model of Chinese typewriter was awarded to Qi Xuan, a young engineering student at New York University. A native of South China, Qi had spent years developing an easier-to-use arrangement of Chinese characters, one that enabled typists to locate words at a much faster rate.

This innovation mattered little to American journalists, however, who instead reveled in recounting the humorous story of the very first letter inscribed on Qi’s apparatus. Authored by the Chinese Consul-General of New York for the Chinese Minister in Washington, the message took two hours to complete despite a length of only one hundred words. Discounted was the fact that the operator had never used the machine before in his life, that he had not received training in Qi’s system of arranging characters, and that he was no doubt interacting with both the inventor and journalists during the process.

The same condescending tone pervaded media accounts in the years following, as in a Washington Post article published two years later about a newly patented machine which surpassed that of Qi. Entitled “The Newest Inventions,” the article placed the new model of Chinese typewriter alongside such absurdities as a “dancing radiator doll” and “a mouse trap for burglars.”

Two decades and nearly one dozen patents later, inventors in the forties and fifties began to develop Chinese typewriters of unprecedented sophistication. Two inventors in particular, Gao Zhongqin and Lin Yutang, created designs that caught the attention of IBM and Merganthaler.

IBM teamed up with Gao to create an electric model capable of producing roughly six thousand characters using only forty-three keys (fewer than most Macintosh laptops). Mergantheler joined forces with Lin, who was already something of a celebrity in America owing to his two New York Times bestselling novels. Like Gao’s machine, Lin’s “Mingkwai” model was also based on a pioneering system of categorizing characters which enabled users to type upwards of ninety thousand different characters using only seventy-two keys.

Despite the unprecedented achievements of both machines, however, neither was able to dislodge the longstanding stereotype. IBM failed to find a market for its prototype or to overcome the widespread assumption that Chinese typewriters were, regardless of their sophistication, curiosities at best and absurdities at worst. Lin’s machine fared somewhat better, praised by some as a device that would “revolutionize Chinese office work.”

To the reporters at the Chicago Daily Tribune, however, news of Lin’s invention was received with an emotion “transcending dismay and yet appreciably milder than despair.” By tangling himself in this silly business of Chinese typewriter (which the reporter assumed must have been “the size of a pipe organ”) the reputation of “our favorite Oriental author” had been sullied. Responses such as these undoubtedly contributed to the difficulties Lin faced in finding a market for his machine. Unable to recoup his research and development expenses, Lin ultimately fell into bankrtuptcy and was pursued by the IRS well into the 1950s.

Over the subsequent two decades, inventors in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States went on to develop ever more sophisticated and commercially popular models of Chinese typewriters. By the 1970s, their designs had become so advanced, in fact, that the line began to blur between electric Chinese typewriters and early Chinese computers.

On the mainland, engineers developed a pen-based machine that increased speeds by means of an early form of predictive text, anticipating the now widely popular technology by more than two decades. Another engineer, Yeh Chen-hui, used what he had learned from designing a Chinese typewriter to develop a machine that revolutionized the newspaper industry in Taiwan, leading to the complete abandonment of manual typesetting in a number of major publishing houses. To this day, Yeh maintains that his machine was the first true word processor.

Despite this long history of technological achievement equal to, if not more impressive than its Roman alphabet counterpart, the Chinese typewriter has remained an icon of backwardness in the West. When it is not openly ridiculed, at most the machine has served as a medium through which artists have explored the comical, the strange, and the ironic, as in the short-lived mystery series “The Chinese Typewriter” starring eighties hearththrob Tom Selleck, the similarly titled film by experimental artist Daniel Barnett, and the carnivalesque ditty “Her Chinese Typewriter” by indie rocker Matthew Friedberger.

Even The Simpsons entered the fray in 2001. Having been hired to write fortune cookies, Homer Simpson is shown dictating pithy jewels of wisdom to his daughter, who is taking dictation on a Chinese typewriter. “You will invent a humorous toilet lid”; “You will find true love on Flag Day”; “Your store is being robbed, Apu.” He pauses for a moment to confirm that she is keeping up. “Are you getting all this, Lisa?” The frame switches to Lisa, who is postured nervously in front of the absurdly complex machine, pressing buttons slowly and with hesitation. In elongated, uncertain syllables she responds: “I don’t knowwwwww.”

It appears that, faced with a rapidly changing China, our views have remained trapped in a past that never actually existed.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Chinese Nation (forthcoming from University of California Press) and is currently writing a global history of the Chinese typewriter. He can be reached at tsmullaney@stanford.edu

Rambling Notes: Tracing “Old Shanghai” at the Futuristic Heart of “New China”

By Niv Horesh

Shanghai is in many ways the face of the new People’s Republic. Even as the city has been remade in recent decades, efforts are underway to selectively salvage what remains of its pre-war architectural heritage (1842-1937) and many of its archival records are becoming accessible to foreign researchers. Touted as Asia’s biggest and most cosmopolitan urban centre in the pre-war era, Shanghai has (re)emerged over the last two decades as “a harbinger of China’s future and a testing ground for the world at large.”

It is therefore worth reprising Shanghai’s distant treaty-port past not just as tourist-trivia pursuit: the past also offers a perspective from which to observe the imminent rise of the city to global prominence.

Memory Lane

One of few exhilarating privileges Shanghai history buffs can nowadays enjoy is staying at the city’s oldest-running hotel, the tactfully-refurbished Astor House (est. 1846), near Suzhou Creek. In its heyday, The Astor hosted luminaries like US President Ulysses S. Grant, Charlie Chaplin, Guglielmo Marconi, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and even Zhou Enlai. A 15-minute walk due south, along the ceaselessly re-vamped Bund is the Shanghai Municipal Archives. There, history buffs can relish on demand letters written by the managers of the very same Astor over a century ago, complaining to the foreign-run Shanghai Municipal Council about “natives,” “coolies” and “rickshaws” making too much noise for patrons to bear.

Returning to the Astor from the Archives, history buffs cannot but note that road hazards and noise are still a feature of the hotel environment; however, Santanas have by now supplanted rickshaws as the most common means of transport, and whites no longer run the municipal council. Neither is there a sign of Shanghai’s once ubiquitous double-deckers and trams, though Soviet-style electric-powered buses still ply the routes between the Bund and Nanjing Road. Back in the 1940s Shanghai’s traffic amenities fired up rustic imagination, with newly-imported American automobiles and regular flights serving the high-heeled between the city and Hong Kong, as was beautifully captured in Eileen Chang’s classic screenplay Taitai wansui. The comparable traffic novelty at present is the fact that one can, as of this year, board direct flights from Pudong International Airport to Taipei after decades of cross-strait political chill.

China’s relative openness is evident elsewhere too. Official mouthpieces like the China Daily unabashedly carry the occasional translated op-ed piece from Japan’s Asahi Shinbun. And against the backdrop of a global financial crisis, the local press is explicitly calling for a more transparent central-government stimulus package to the provinces, warning that such ad hoc funding might be siphoned off by corrupt officials.

This openness can also be felt in any Shanghai bookshop one walks into: Nobel prize winner Gao Xingjian’s titles are still off limits, but one does find a local variant of Obamania with the First Lady’s translated biography selling fast alongside localized editions of anything from Forbes to Marie Claire; DVDs of American sitcoms like Friends; scores of yoga exercise books; European classics from Dickens to Zola. Even the flippant Lonely Planet travel guides are on offer in Chinese, though the LP volume on the PRC itself presumably contained too much politically sensitive commentary to be approved by censors. The sheer variety of printed matter is such that one is even tempted for a second to comb shelves for a Chinese novel of Slumdog Millionaire appeal, only to realize that such searing social critique of the inequalities attending “emerging economies” clearly cannot be accommodated even in this era of PRC openness.

As Jeff Wasserstrom described in his Japan Focus article (“Red Shanghai, Blue Shanghai”), the hype surrounding Shanghai is set to peak during Expo 2010 with the inauguration of a huge pavilion and bridge complex in Pudong combining traditional Chinese motifs and the last word in urban design. Already, visitors cannot but marvel at Shanghai’s cityscape, which is rapidly being transformed, while preservation of pre-war architecture is almost inevitably taking the back seat. Unlike Beijing, where the global economic turnaround has cast a pall over the Olympics construction frenzy, leaving much office space practically empty -- high-rise construction in Shanghai still seems in full swing, presumably in anticipation that demand will hold as the city prepares for Expo 2010. The official press is buoyant, but elsewhere pundits talk of a major glut and impending price collapse. What will happen the day after Expo 2010 closes is anyone’s guess.

Skyscrapers have by now popped up well beyond the pre-war city perimeters. The suburb of Jiangwan, for example, had remained all but a ghost-town on the northern outskirts, even as the KMT was trying to turn it into the city’s new civic center in the late 1930s. The KMT-built Jiangwan stadium, once Asia’s largest white elephant, and the eerily empty civic library are still there. But the suburb has re-invented itself as a hi-tech and tertiary-education powerhouse where Oracle’s China headquarters, amongst other multinationals, are located.

The North-eastern suburb of Wusong, on the mouth of the Huangpu River, was until the 1980s a sparsely-populated (though strategically important) frontier. It is now a crowded mesh of maritime warehouses and shopping malls. The local Qing-era cannon platform (Wusong paotai) is the only reminder of the old frontier. The real frontier nowadays is South-western suburbia where Disney-fied compounds are being built for the nouveau riche; there is now a huge gated community with perfectly Victorian streets in Songjiang (“Thamestown”) and a “German New Town” near Volkswagen’s plant in Anting.

As indicated above, the city’s geographical features are quite different than the pre-war setting in both name and substance. Some milestones endured: Nanjing Road is still Nanjing Road; the once patently louche Great World Amusement Centre (Da shijie) and carefree Wing On (Yong An) Department Store are still there, albeit tamed by state ownership; the exquisite Huxinting tea house, one of China’s oldest, endures millions of tourists annually. But true to communist frugality, “Yan’an Road” was chosen to replace “Edward VII Avenue” in what was once the International Settlement. And in what was once the French Settlement, Huaihai Road replaced the famous “Avenue Joffre.”

In the 1950s, a Soviet-style Exhibition Centre was built over the semi-legendary Hardoon Garden; streets once named after foreign tycoons like Silas Hardoon or Chinese financier Yu Xiaqing have been “rectified.” The semi-legendary race course, once the lynchpin of expatriate social life, has been carved up to make way for the People’s Square – Asia’s semicolonial horseracing streak lives on in Hong Kong and, more recently, a few new mainland locations.

China’s erstwhile “Fleet Street,”Wangping Road, is now Shandong Road. But the unique pre-war vibrancy of that area in which scores of independent publishers thrived is long gone. So too are many of the quaint creeks and canals which once crisscrossed the city, and were reclaimed in the 1910s to make way for tenements and roads – their traces are barely evident in street names carrying the suffix bang 浜 or gang 港 for “waterway.” Similarly, the wall which had once encircled Nantao, or the “Native City,” is only evident in the crescent shape which Renmin Road and Zhonghua Road form.

The Pudong-Puxi Antonym

Lying east of the Huangpu River, the ultra-modern precinct of Pudong was first envisioned by Sun Yat-sen. In the 1920s, he dreamed of a Chinese-run Shanghai that would overshadow what expatriates called “the model settlement,” namely, the International and French concession areas west of the Huangpu River (Puxi).

Pudong’s spectacular skyline and its sleek Century Avenue were built only in the last two decades, much faster than any other comparable city in the West. If during Sun’s time, and through much of the PRC’s history, the Bund’s waterfront edifices connoted Shanghai’s prosperity under European tutelage, today’s Pudong vicariously lives up to Sun’s vision of overshadowing the old foreign concessions. This symbolism is by no means lost on Shanghai history buffs, and was most certainly on urban planners’ minds in the late 1980s. The Bund’s colonial flavor has been wonderfully preserved, cynics might add, precisely so that it can be dwarfed by Chinese-developed high-rise construction to the east.

As if to make the historical analogy clear, urban planners ensured that every bit of the Bund’s neo-classical and art-deco gems would be meticulously preserved at the expense of most other heritage sites elsewhere in Puxi. In recent years, agile state-backed property developers have been able to take over some of these neglected sites, turning them into exclusive “Old Shanghai”-themed hotels. The great majority, however, still lie dilapidated. More often than not, their 1930s grandeur is drowned out by prosaic eye-sores like shabby air-con wiring or by garish nearby office-blocks.

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Clearly, Pudong is built to overawe visitors: many of its waterfront skyscrapers not only rank among the tallest in the world, but also light up at night, morphing into gigantic LCD screens. Their glass veneers carry a corny blend of commercials and local-government slogans calling on locals to, among other things, congenially greet visitors from other parts of China in standard Mandarin.



The place has definitely got a “Blade-Runner” feel to it, with multinationals headquartered there in magnificent high-rises, alongside even greater high-rises housing newly-established, semi state-owned corporate entities that are aggressively primed to become the Sonys and IBMs of tomorrow. It boasts the world’s only magnetic-traction bullet train (Mag-Lev) and a state-of-the-art subway system and Zeppelins constantly screen commercials and slogans overhead as they waft between skyscrapers.

Gazing at Pudong from across the river, Shanghai seems unfazed by the global financial crisis: the official line pledges to steam ahead with greater investment in higher-education and R&D (Kejiao xing shi). Amid the shine and sparkle, many locals have reassured this history buff that the global financial crisis was not going to hit Shanghai at all. Otherwise, why would banking giant HSBC erect its new 250-metre tall China headquarters in Pudong ? Such, we are told, is the bank’s “confidence… in the Chinese economy” that its Pudong home would be much taller than its Hong Kong base (180 m) or, for that matter, its London world headquarters (200 m).

There is canny symbolism to all of this. Completed in 1923, the much smaller domed building which rules the Bund skyline on the opposite bank was once HSBC’s old China headquarters. That was an era when HSBC was China’s de facto central bank. In the 1950s, this building was expropriated by the CCP, and in a wry twist of fate, is now home to the state-owned Pudong Development Bank.



In another twist of fate, foreign banks whose forerunners are less associated with colonialism are returning to the Bund waterfront; Citibank and ABN AMRO are but two examples. The former case is particularly interesting since Citibank’s other Shanghai building dominates Pudong’s skyline from across the river. Citibank accentuates, in that sense, an affiliation with both “Old” and “New” Shanghai. But the big question, of course, is whether Citibank’s upbeat China outlook can help mitigate its sub-prime shemozzle at home. Or could it be that Shanghainese optimism is misguided, and Wall Street will eventually catch up with Century Avenue?

AIG was a supposedly invincible multinational now groaning under the load of US-derived bad debt – this group and its executive bonuses are the talk of the day in Wall Street and on Capitol Hill. However, it seems that only history buffs are aware that AIG actually owes its rise to prominence to Shanghai in the first place. It was here that Cornelius Vander Starr set up the American International Group without much fanfare in 1919. Like HSBC, AIG relocated after the Communist take-over to eventually become one of the largest financial arbiters in the world. Like HSBC, it returned to China with a vengeance in the 1990s. But unlike HSBC, which has survived sub-prime vertigo relatively well, AIG’s future existence is uncertain. Thus, this is not only a question of Wall Street catching up with Century Avenue, but also of the PRC reminding Wall Street and Capitol Hill of Shanghai’s global stature in times past, and of staking out what it sees as the city’s rightful claim to the future of global finance.

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Is the claim legitimate? Granted, for all its hype Pudong does connote quite a bit of contrivance. At dusk, the neon lights loom large, but on closer look the precinct does not exactly teem with life, and traffic is surprisingly light for a Chinese city.

For a moment, one cannot but wonder if Pudong, too, was perhaps an artifact of sub-prime-like self-delusion. It is, after all, well-known that the central government has poured billions of yuan into this area, often with very little scrutiny. The Mag-Lev is a striking example: for all its gripping special-effects and dazzling speed, it fails to reach populous Puxi, and is therefore hardly-used by commuters. Its main proponent, former mayor Chen Liangyu, now languishes in jail on corruption charges.

Pudong’s skyline clearly offers a counterpoint to the enduring mystique of “Old Shanghai.”[1] But despite two decades of heady redevelopment, for most Shanghainese the west bank beckons brighter, as this popular saying suggests: “I’d rather have a bed to lie on in Puxi than own a whole flat in Pudong!” (Ningyao Puxi yi zhang chuang, bu yao Pudong yi jian fang 宁要浦西一张床，不要浦东一间房!).

This hints at a deeper sentiment: for many Pudong is still too contrived and showy. It lacks the historical sediment of Puxi, nowadays re-enacted in Puxi in upmarket theme malls such as Xintiandi. One history buff’s blog captures this desire with the phrase shili yangcheng (十里洋场), a four-character expression connoting the “wondrous metropolis of foreign flavours”, which was renowned the world over in the 1930s for its ballrooms, cinemas, cafes, and bars.

What’s more, stunning skyscrapers are increasingly being built around Puxi too. They often encircle what little remains of Shanghai’s distinctive pre-war shikumen tenements. Chinglish, on the other hand, is still alive and well despite the catch-cry of globalization. Thus, for example, People’s Square is rendered “Civilised Park” on a prominent plaque at the entrance. Below the Square is a huge underground shopping arcade themed after “Old Shanghai” with 1930s-style peep shows (la yangpian 拉洋片) and distorting mirrors (haha jing 哈哈镜).

The arcade is one of many venues capitalizing on “Old Shanghai” mystique, ranging from the quirky history museum at the Oriental Pearl TV Tower basement, to restaurants professing to serve “Old Shanghai” fare, to countless “Old Shanghai” brand names.

The Last Word

For all the reasons described above, Shanghai has (re)emerged as a magnet for visitors, micro- entrepreneurs and laborers from all over China. It is also attracting more and more Western expatriates of all socio-economic rungs, though their ratio of the city’s population is still smaller than in the 1930s.

That said, we should reserve the last word for the Shanghainese themselves. They are not – and cannot be – the enterprising sojourners of “Old Shanghai.” Ironically, the strict hukou residency restrictions of Mao’s era nurtured an elitist, linguistically and culturally cohesive sense of Shanghaineseness. The city was quite subdued during the 1989 student protest movement, and has since 1991 been smothered in preferential central-government funding.

The Shanghainese of today are a “born-and-bred” privileged corps. Though clearly approving of foreigners, they are often said to be haughty and suspicious of other Chinese. They are described as much more inward-looking and risk-averse than their migrant-society forebears: those resourceful sojourners who had converged on the city from every corner of China at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, for all their perceived shortcomings, today’s Shanghainese project optimism. This history buff is convinced Shanghai will weather the global financial crisis, and maintain its growth momentum for the most part. The end-product, though, may not eclipse “Old Shanghai” insofar as cosmopolitanism, openness and innovation are concerned. Other parts of China may (or may not) fill the gap.

That Shanghai and its dwellers are future-bound there can be no doubt. But whether Shanghai is the future is another question.

[1] On the enduring mystique of ‘Old Shanghai’ see e.g. Hugo Restall’s excellent piece [March 5, 2009] in the Wall Street Journal