In Case You Missed It: Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture

By Miri Kim

For scholars of China who are interested in modernity, the looming question seems to be, is 'modernity' a valid and useful analytical category for describing, explaining, and understanding China? And if so, how should modernity and its attendant conceptual apparatuses be deployed in investigations of China's various aspects, historical, political, cultural, and so on? In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture, editor Kam Louie and a distinguished list of contributors seek to explore China within its particular modern contexts and clarify the idea of 'modernity' by using historical and contemporary cases.

In his introduction Louie writes, "At first glance, the concept of 'modern' should not present many problems since it should really be a matter of definition only," with the standard definition locating the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution as the benchmark by which to recognize the advent of the modern era (3). Louie rejects this definition as being unrepresentative of changes in Chinese culture; he likewise rejects the rigid schema used to organize Chinese history using the terms jindai (mid-nineteenth-century to the 1919 May Fourth Movement), xiandai (1919 to 1949), and dangdai (the post-1949, i.e. contemporary, period) (3-4).

Instead, Louie proposes 1900 as the beginning of modern Chinese culture, due to the changes heralded as well as influenced by the intense output of works on modernization from famous writers like Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei around that time (5). As this starting point implies, the influence of late Qing culture on China's emerging modern cultures is taken seriously by the authors featured in this volume. And as Louie points out, this periodicization centers the discussion of modern Chinese culture firmly in the twentieth-century and beyond, into a "new millennium [that] has already witnessed a Chinese culture that was unimaginable only a few generations ago" (6-7).

The matter of how to define 'China' and Chineseness, while perhaps not quite as harrowing as plunging into the vast literature on modernity, also merits mention in the introduction and is addressed in several chapters. As the twentieth century is such a big focus of this volume, Chinese diasporas and overseas communities and the ways in which they have shaped and are shaping modern Chinese culture also constitutes an important part of the story. For example, the benefits and significance of an outsider connection can be clearly seen in the phenomenon of the so-called haigui, relatively young, foreign-educated, energetic professionals who are returning to live and work in China in increasing numbers. Wang Gungwu's chapter, "Flag, flame and embers: diaspora cultures" highlights the connections between overseas Chinese communities within their host countries as well as with mainland China, as well as offering an interesting comparative look at different diasporic communities and how their specific histories affect their relationship to Chinese culture (123-124). Wang divides diasporic communities into three types, “the faithful,” composed of those who contend that non-mainland Chinese culture is the only authentic one, “the peripheral,” who “strive for a modified authenticity that could win recognition not so much from their fellow nationals as from the Chinese of China,” and “the marginal,” who have absorbed elements of host cultures to the greatest extent (129-130). Wang suggests that “the quality of the modern culture that China projects to the outside world” (132) will be a key element in the ways these communities define and negotiate their identities and national-cultural relationships with China, host countries, and other diasporic communities.

In another chapter dealing with changing configurations of Chinese culture, Sor-Hoon Tan examines the phenomenon of the Xin Rujia (translated as “Contemporary Neo-Confucians” or “New Confucians”), a diverse group of writers and thinkers who advocate a culturalist strategy for situating and understanding China in the world, particularly vis-à-vis modernization and the West (129-130). Rather than a single unified movement calling for the return of “traditional” values or rehabilitation of old forms of Confucian philosophy, New Confucians take many different approaches to reconfiguring and repositioning meanings within Chinese culture. In chapter five, William Jankowiak, in "Ethnicity and Chinese identity: ethnographic insight and political positioning," discusses social, cultural, and historical aspects of conflicts over identity playing out along the Han-minority axis of ethnic relations. As this chapter suggests, the volatile and ambiguous intersections between ethnic identity and political agency in China presents a persistent challenge to contemporary attempts to define 'Chineseness,' where historical linkages mesh uneasily with geopolitics and the contingencies of the present.

Past and present also run together in David Clarke’s chapter on modernity and Chinese art in the past century. Highly readable, his essay on the long-term trends in Chinese art from the Republican period to the twenty-first century comes at a time when modern Chinese art has gone global in scale and scope. The article provides a historical perspective that is sure to be informative and useful during a time when the international market for works of art is undergoing significant changes, with recent developments pointing to a downturn whose duration and effect remain unclear. Another chapter worth highlighting is Arif Dirlik's "Socialism in China: a historical overview," which contains a succinct summary of the overarching political developments in twentieth century China, sparse in detail but effective in conveying the importance and effects of socialism as theory and practice in China in a world historical context. Moreover, given its brief length, this chapter may function very well as a primer for undergraduate students on the topic.

While the authors present a varied look at the contexts for Chinese modernity since 1900, they do little to address the uneven modern experience in China during the past century, an inequality even more apparent as the “modern” has been defined by the infiltration of high technology and the urban lifestyle. Overall, however, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture presents a thematically coherent, interesting, and useful guide to the multifaceted changes unfolding in China today.

Berkshire Encyclopedia on New Media

Berkshire Publishing has recently published its Encyclopedia of China with contributions by China scholars like Sherman Cochran, Kerry Brown, Judy Polumbaum and many others and featuring one thousand entries on a diverse range of historical, social and cultural topics.

A few of the entries caught our attention as a little unusual for a print encyclopedia—including entries on “internet use,” “online social networking,” and “blogging.” As these topics are of particular interest to us (and we’re guessing to many of you, too), we were curious how Berkshire would cover them in the encyclopedia format. Here are a few relevant excerpts (selected from much longer entries), reprinted with Berkshire’s permission.

Internet Use

Internet use if regulated and monitored by the government. Watchers scan website content for hot political issues, such as Falun Gong and the situation in Tibet, and content deemed socially unhealthy, such as pornography and violence. Web masters also monitor online discussions in chat rooms, a method of self-censoring. Generally speaking, Chinese Internet uses accept government intervention much more readily than users in Western countries would do. In CNIP surveys conducted in 2003, 2005, and 2007, more than 80 percent of respondents in China said that the Internet should be controlled (mainly on pornography and violence) and that they government should be the controlling agent.

Social Networking

China’s online youth are finding friendship and solace, as well as information and entertainment, in cyberspace. They are searching for others who can relate to their experiences and who may share their mind-set. Online social networking is also becoming functional and a way to adjust to real-world relationships. Online dating sites, such as lotus.com and love21cn.com (or Jiayuan.com), are increasingly chosen for meeting potential marriage partners. Web portals, such as MSN, Skype, and QQ (which boasts more than 220 million users), are accessed by many merchants as customer-service and marketing tools to reach out to real-world customers...

For many Chinese, online communities offer an alternative to traditional sources of information, an alternative that is often viewed as more trustworthy than corporate or government sources and more relevant than received wisdom handed down from elders with assurances that it is true because they say so.

Social and entertainment infrastructures in China are more limited than they are in the West. The Internet, however, provides easy access to entertainment. Its interactive nature seems to fit particularly well with Chinese culture.

Educational opportunities are still uneven in China, with most major universities and information centers still clustered in and around Beijing and Shanghai, but the Internet allows students anywhere to make use of online databases and other global information sources. Online initiatives are seen as crucial to solving the East-West educational divide…

BBS, relationship management media (sites such as MySpace or Cyworld), massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs), file-sharing systems, and wikis are examples of social media in which many people interact with many other people—from the many to the many. Cyworld is an interesting example. Originating in South Korea, it currently has some 17 million users. It combines the features of MySpace, Flickr, and virtual worlds; its many users upload approximately 6.2 million photos daily. (Flickr, by contrast, uploads approximately 500,000 photos daily.)…

Another interesting phenomenon is the race to be the first to respond to a post. Being the first to respond demonstrates respect; therefore, it has special importance. The first-response slot is given a special name: the “sofa.” People routinely compete to “grab the sofa” 抢沙发, that is, to try to be the first reader to respond.

Blogs

The year 2003 was important for the development of blogs in China; the number of users reached 200,000. In 2004 came the commercialization of the blog. In 2005 blogging spread from the elites to all netizens and non-netizens. In July 2005 the first Chinese blog movie was made. Since 2006 the number of Chinese bloggers has grown rapidly. According to the Survey Report of Chinese Internet, by the end of November 2007 the number of Chinese blogs had reached 72.82 million, whereas the number of Chinese bloggers had reached 47 million—30 million more than in August 2006. Among those bloggers 17 million were active.

The statistics of CNNIC show that only 3 percent of blogs are visited more than one hundred times per day, and 8 percent are visited more than fifty times per day. It is difficult to exploit the advertisement value of blogs if one only operates a single blog as a media forum.

Berkshire Encyclopedia of China 宝库山 中华全书. 5 volumes, 2,754 pages, 8½×11 inches. ISBN 0-9770159-4-7. Published May 2009. Price: US$675 (includes free one-year online individual subscription, value $129). Orders may be placed online, or by e-mail to amy@berkshirepublishing.com. Tel +1 413 528 0206 Fax +1 413 541 0076.

In Case You Missed It: Death by a Thousand Cuts

By David Porter

Review of Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts, Harvard University Press, 2008. $29.95

In the months leading up to the Beijing games, as Tibet protests flared and t-shirts derided the “Genocide Olympics,” Jill Savitt, the Executive Director of the human rights group Dream for Darfur deployed a striking phrase in a New York Times interview about her group’s plans to pressure Beijing to take action on Sudan. Promising a broad-based campaign that would be far more sophisticated than a mere “ham-fisted boycott,” she explained, “From start to finish, what we want China to fear is death by a thousand cuts.”

In a coincidence tinged with historical irony, an important book published in the same month as this article began with the observation that the form of capital punishment known in China as “lingchi” and in English as “death by slicing” or “death by a thousand cuts” has served the Western imagination for over a century as a vivid emblem of Chinese barbarism. Read in this context, Savitt’s comment, by implicitly linking a notorious penal practice with atrocities in Darfur, reminds us of the continuing power of collective images of “feudal” China to inform current discussions of global politics, and suggests that much of the current passion concerning the human rights situation in China may have roots in a century-old preoccupation with peculiarly Chinese expressions of state power.

Arising out of a symposium on the comparative history of torture, Death by a Thousand Cuts offers a rich, wide-ranging examination of the histories of both the actual practice of lingchi and of the resonances of this and other forms of (often fantastical) punishments in the Chinese and Western imaginations. In some ways, the story is considerably more banal than one might expect: lingchi was used relatively rarely, and when it was, death was brought on quickly with a stab to the heart; the remaining cuts being mostly for show. In others, it poses unexpected challenges to the familiar pieties that are the continuing legacy of Western visitors’ descriptions of late Qing society. Like footbinding, the historical spectacle of lingchi has reassured generations of European and American observers of the comparative decency and humaneness of their own social practices. The flattering stories we tell ourselves, however, may merit additional scrutiny when they turn out, as the authors argue in the case of lingchi, to have been constructed for this purpose.

The book begins with a graphic account of the public execution of a prisoner condemned in 1904 for the murder of twelve members of a family with whom he had been involved in a property dispute. The event was notable both for being one of the last uses of lingchi—the punishment was abolished in 1905—and for being one of the first recorded by an amateur photographer. The coincidence was crucial in the consolidation of a powerful trope in the Western “understanding” of China. “By preserving images of cruel punishments from the last execution season of the old penal regime, European photographers preserved the gap between Chinese and European penal practices that the Qing state was about to close, making these shocking deaths a permanent memorial of cultural difference.” The crucial point here, as the authors demonstrate, is that an awareness of cultural difference did not so much arise out of the observation of lingchi as require and compulsively feed upon this observation to sustain a belief in essential, irreducible alterity. At times, this belief has taken the form of judgments that Chinese culture breeds an unusual capacity for (and insensibility to) bodily cruelty, but it has also informed, one might argue, the continuing insistence on depicting it as fundamentally lacking in qualities (democracy, human rights, rule of law) deemed necessary to civilized society.

A first step in complicating narratives of essential difference is to demonstrate deeply rooted similarities. Turning to the annals of European history, for example, the authors point out that the abolition of cruel and unusual punishments was a relatively recent development, and that it has only been through the convenient forgetting of this history that Western observers were able to make of tormented execution an icon of Chinese inhumanity and a proof of the cultural superiority of the West. The number of crimes warranting capital punishment seems also to have been comparable: the Ming legal code lists 241 capital offenses; as late as 1819, English law had 223. In the light of recent debates on Bush-era interrogation practices, it is interesting to read that “Chinese and European courts shared a concern to limit the use of judicial torture,” and that Chinese magistrates frequently warned of the unreliability of evidence given under torture. Various forms of sanctioned violence, it is clear, have played a role in the formation of every state; sensationalizing certain instances while downplaying others can only distort historical understanding.

Given the high instrumental value of essentializing narratives, they are unlikely to be dislodged, however, by the mere counter-assertion of parallels and congruencies. The authors rightly devote the bulk of their efforts to the more promising strategy of demythologizing lingchi by tracing, in painstaking detail, its historical evolution as both practice and symbol. Several chapters, then, offer careful studies of the recourse to capital punishment in the Chinese legal code, key portions of which remained in place from the late sixth century through the early twentieth. The most common crimes resulting in the death penalty in the late imperial period were murder, robbery, official malfeasance, and failure of military duty; the most serious crimes were those that threatened the dynasty, the emperor or the state, followed closely by those attacking the authority of parents, elders, husbands, officials, and teachers. From its earliest recorded uses in the Song period, the penalty of lingchi—the rarest of several recognized methods of execution—was closely regulated and authorized only in extraordinary circumstances. Its use in the Song, in fact, was viewed by both contemporaries and subsequent generations of legal scholars as a sign of moral regression, as the death penalty had been abolished altogether by the Tang in 747 (a thousand years before its abolition was proposed in Europe).

The symbolic valences of lingchi are perhaps the most compelling—and challenging—aspects of its history. The ethical significance of the punishment seems to have attached less to the physical pain involved (the coup de grace was typically administered on the third cut) than the dismemberment and exposure of the corpse. To desecrate an individual’s body was ritually to destroy his entire family as well as the continuity between this life and the next. The imaginative resonances of this destruction are explored in a fascinating chapter on representations of the Buddhist underworld, which graphically depicted atrocities that vastly exceeded punishments authorized under the Qing code. Similar imaginative elaborations characterize the history of Western accounts of Chinese punishments explored in the following chapters. The authors trace the origins of stereotypes of Chinese judicial cruelty back to the sixteenth century, demonstrating how they were subsequently refracted through Enlightenment notions of Oriental despotism, colonialist historiography, missionary tracts, and the ruminations of Georges Bataille to create an idée fixe as essential to European self-knowledge as the liberal ideals of Locke or Mill.

Any book by three authors is bound to show a few seams, and there are discontinuities and repetitions among some of the chapters that are occasionally distracting. But on the whole, the argument presented in these chapters and buttressed by thorough and wide-ranging historical scholarship, is as focused as it is forceful. Death by a Thousand Cuts will stand as a significant contribution both to East-West comparative history and to the critical interrogation of those intricate legacies of Orientalism that make it so hard to do well.

They Chose China Now at YouTube

Last year, China Beat ran a review of Shuibo Wang's fascinating documentary, They Chose China. The documentary traces the stories of American POWs who chose to stay in China after the 1953 Korean War armistice. 

At the time that we ran that review, we noted that the video was hard to come by. Now, however, the entire documentary has been posted on YouTube, in five parts. We've posted all five parts below (and here are direct links to YouTube for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V). Those interested in learning more might also be interested in this recent interview with director Shuibo Wang. 

In Case You Missed It: Uncle Ho and Uncle Sam

By A. Tom Grunfeld

Uncle Ho and Uncle Sam, Produced by Richard Bradley, BBC/Arts and Entertainment Networks co-production, 1995. 50 minutes. A TimeWatch film. [BBC documentary series]

During the wars in Indochina, Americans exhibited little interest in the histories of the nations their country was ravaging. This is not so dissimilar from today, as the United States wages wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without any discernable uptick in the sales of history books which would allow for a greater understanding of current events in a broader historical perspective.

The vast majority of Americans remained ignorant of the history of Vietnamese-American relations; especially of one of the most fascinating and improbable events - the brief period when the Vietnamese nationalist and communist leader Ho Chi Minh worked for the US government.

During the war the US wartime intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was operating in southern China and Southeast Asia out of Kunming in Yunnan province. Their activities in Vietnam consisted of collecting reports from French agents then living under loose Japanese rule. In March 1945 the Japanese took full control of Vietnam and arrested all French citizens, including the OSS contacts, leaving American intelligence blind in that region.

Just about then a group of Vietnamese nationalists emerged out of the jungles escorting a downed U.S. flyer to safety in Kunming. The group was led by Ho Chi Minh who had been agitating, in one way or another, for Vietnamese independence for 25 years. The OSS knew from their counterparts on the French side that Ho, a leader of the nationalist Viet Minh, was a communist but instructions from Washington were to ignore that as he was too valuable at that moment and communists, after all, were wartime allies against the Japanese.

Ho and his band of patriots had similar goals to the United States: defeat Japan and support, rhetorically at least on the American side, independence from colonial rule. The OSS decided to work with Ho and he became, in official OSS parlance, Agent 19, code name Lucius.

During the summer of 1945 seven Americans parachuted into Ho’s jungle base on the Vietnam-China border after Ho had returned from Kunming accompanied by Frank Tan, a Chinese-American OSS officer and a Chinese OSS radio operator from Hong Kong named Mac Shin.

The goal of this alliance was to have Ho’s group provide weather information, vital intelligence for the air force at a time before weather satellites, to interdict Japanese troops, rescue downed American flyers and to provide whatever intelligence about the Japanese that they could obtain.

The war ended soon after and the joint OSS-Viet Minh operation was never fully engaged. OSS officers were in Hanoi when Ho declared independence in September and were, in fact occupied in developing their own intelligence service in Vietnam, separate from the British and French. These activities caused considerable friction among the allies as did American sympathy for Vietnamese independence at a time when the British and the French were trying to re-establish French colonial rule in Indochina.

This unlikely and little known relationship is the subject of this extraordinary film. Jointly produced by the BBC television program, TimeWatch and the American Arts & Entertainment Network in 1995, the film’s strengths are its use of rare footage (including Ho washing his clothes and demonstrating hand-to-hand combat, Ho declaring independence in Hanoi) and interviews with Vietnamese, French (who, astonishingly continue to spout colonist rhetoric four decades after losing their southeast Asian colonies), and American participants.

The film traces the history of this relationship between the OSS officers and their Viet Minh counterparts. The film also addresses the post-war rivalries among the allies. We hear a little about the motivations of the French and far more about the political disputes on the American side, but nothing about the thinking on the Vietnamese side apart from the most obvious. It will be a long time, I would think, before we have sufficient access to the Vietnamese archives for this period. Unfortunately the film ends in 1945 and does not mention the repeated attempts by Ho in the years immediately after the war to reach out to the United States for assistance and support in his anti-colonial struggle. He wrote several letters to Harry S. Truman and the Department of State; letters that were not only not answered, but never even acknowledged.

It is clear that the American participants in these events believed that the United States lost an opportunity in Vietnam. The unspoken, but pretty obvious conclusion they draw is that if Washington had been more accommodating to Ho in the 1940s, there would have been no Vietnam War years later. The OSS officers were quite fond of Ho and his band of rebels and believed that Ho was a nationalist more than a communist. Their superiors in Washington felt otherwise.

In 1995 the living participants met in Vietnam for an oral history project sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Vietnam USA Society. Then, in September 1997, they met again in New York City culminating in a public one-day conference on September 24 at the Asia Society. It was at that event that “Uncle Ho and Uncle Sam” was shown and it may have been the single public viewing in the United States. The film was shown in 1995 on BBC television in the United Kingdom and on the A&E Network in the United States as part of their “Investigative Reports” series.

You can see an annotated list of who participated in the oral history and the New York City reunion at this website.

This is a wonderful and compelling documentary, an important historical document in itself. It should have been shown widely and should be shown, especially in schools and colleges. Instead it saw the light of day ever so briefly and has disappeared from memory and marketplace. I could not find any traces of it on the BBC or A&E websites, nor is it on sale commercially or on eBay. This a valuable documentary record which needs to be resurrected and widely distributed.

Selected Bibliography:

Dixee R. Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh. Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan. University Press of Kansas, 2006.

William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life, Hyperion, 2001.

Gary R. Hess, "Franklin Roosevelt and Indochina," The Journal of American History, 59:2, September 1972, 353-368.

Walter LaFeber, "Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina: 1942-1945," American Historical Review, 80:5, December 1975, 1277-1295.

W. Macy Marvel, “Drift and Intrigue: United States Relations with the Viet-Minh, 1945,” Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 4:1, 1975, 10-27.

Archimedes Patti, Why Vietnam? Prelude to America's Albatross, University of California Press, 1982.

For a story of the Vietnamese honoring surviving OSS member, Mac Shin, in 2008, see here.

A. Tom Grunfeld is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at Empire State College and is the author of many works, including The Making of Modern Tibet.

Chinese Intellectuals and the Problem of Xinjiang, Part 2

Wang Lixiong and progressive democracy

This essay continues the discussion of Wang Lixiong's work begun in Part I, which ran at China Beat on March 9, 2009.

By Sebastian Veg

Having analyzed the issues of colonialism, cultural rights of Uyghur populations, and the question of a Han nationalist revival, Wang Lixiong concludes the book by three “letters” to his Uyghur friend Mokhtar, in which he reframes the discussion on Xinjiang within his more general ideas on political reform in China. His reluctance to consider Xinjiang as “different” from other regions in China (while he is less reluctant to do so in the case of Tibet) is not unproblematic; nonetheless his voice is important because he is a critical intellectual “on the edge” who has visibly not entirely renounced influencing the debate in Beijing policy circles.

Wang Lixiong has some deep-set doubts, both about the practicality of independence as a goal for Xinjiang (due to the presence of a large Han population and their control of resources), and about what he calls “large-scale democracy”. In another text, he expresses his agreement with a draft Constitution prepared by a group of dissidents (Yan Jiaqi and others), under which Tibet would receive a high degree of autonomy and the possibility to determine its own status after 25 years, while Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia would only be granted the status of autonomy through a two-thirds vote in the National People’s Congress.[1]

While Wang insists that he doesn’t mind one way or the other whether Xinjiang becomes independent, he emphasises alternatives to independence: the guarantee of genuine religious freedom, and the possibility of controlling labour migration by a work permit system that would apply to “cultural protection zones” (including Tibet), and which would serve to prevent desertification, degradation of the environment, and growing water shortages (p. 439). For Wang, democratisation in China, as opposed to a higher degree of autonomy, might be prone to nationalist manipulation and internal fracturing. He therefore calls for an embrace of the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way” of a high degree of autonomy within the framework of a federal China, going so far as to propose that the Dalai Lama become the chairman of a provisional government.

Nonetheless, his three “letters to Mokhtar” reveal some of the contradictions underpinning his thoughts on political reform in China. The first letter, devoted to terrorism, is very much in the apocalyptic mode of his science-fiction novel Yellow Peril. In his second letter, he insists on Chinese nationalism. For Wang, China did not experience the nation-state model before 1911, and at that time its first formulation included Xinjiang and Tibet in Sun Yat-sen’s “Republic of five races” (Han, Man/Manchu, Meng/Mongolian, Hui/Muslim, Zang/Tibetan). He adds that nationalism has always been an essential part of CCP ideology, and now the only portion remaining. For these two reasons he believes that democratisation would not necessarily solve the nationality question (p. 444).

Whereas the Soviet constitution, no matter how misused, originally foresaw regional autonomy on paper by virtue of its federal nature, Wang asserts that no similar provision exists in the PRC Constitution, and that as a result, if China began unravelling, there would be no framework to stop the process from spreading to Guangdong or Shanghai. Conversely, he worries about an independent Xinjiang continuing to break down along ethnic lines into myriad autonomous micro-states, underlining that Uyghurs represent a majority of the population in only about one third of the territory concentrated in Southern Xinjiang, where there is no oil and resources. He wonders about the rights of the Hui (although one could easily object that there are Dungan populations in most of Central Asia), and highlights that Tibet, by contrast, is practically a mono-ethnic area. This is somewhat troubling, as in his articles on Tibet Wang argues against the viability of Tibetan independence, despite its ethnic homogeneity, on the grounds that the small Han elite controls the most productive sectors of the economy and the most dynamic groups in Tibetan society (“Zhuceng dijin zhi”, art. cit.).

Wang’s assertion about the lack of a legal framework is not quite true: China’s Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Minzu quyu zizhifa), revised in 2001 and largely disseminated though a 2003 State Council White Paper on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), could provide a legal framework for autonomy (though not for secession, like the Soviet constitution), even though it clearly remains a political fiction at the present time (as was the Soviet constitution).[2] More largely, within the context of the international conventions ratified even by the present Chinese government, as well as other international declarations, a stable body of norms regarding minority rights and rights for indigenous populations would be available to guarantee either substantial autonomy for Uyghurs within China, or for Han within an independent Xinjiang. In this respect, Wang Lixiong seems to remain captive to conventional views in China that describe international covenants as instruments of power play: he describes them as merely a pretext for American or Western intervention in Xinjiang aimed at destabilising China, and quotes the theory of “precedence of human rights over sovereignty” or renquan gaoyu zhuquan.

His third letter deals with his system of proposed “progressive democracy” (dijin minzhu) and the implicit critique of liberal democracy it contains. Wang calls the latter “forum democracy” (guangchang minzhu, p. 457), and believes it can only exacerbate interethnic tensions, which will be fanned by the elite, a phenomenon not unknown in “mature democracies” (he cites support for the Iraq war). “Large-scale democracy” (daguimo minzhu) will polarise political debate and lead straight to fascism (p. 460), as opinion leaders in Xinjiang will want to settle scores with China, the media will pour oil on the fire to make money, and the “masses,” who love heroes and lofty speeches, will follow populists and opportunists.

Nonetheless, he sees democracy as the key to resolving ethnic conflicts, the problem being not democracy itself but “large-scale democracy.” Therefore, Wang goes over old ground by proposing a system of indirect elections, based on natural villages, in which votes would take place by household, each household selecting one representative (one wonders how women would fare in this system of representation), thereby allowing for direct deliberative democracy by consensus. The elected representative automatically becomes a voter on the higher level, and so on, preserving the direct and participatory nature of democracy (p. 464). In fact, this blueprint clearly reveals Wang Lixiong’s misgivings about representation and vote by majority. He favours consensus over voting, pointing out that all elections are problematic, even in the United States (the 2000 presidential election inevitably comes up), not to mention in a Tibetan village in which a majority of inhabitants are illiterate.

Although he writes that in this system policy decisions on various levels should not interfere, he gives no guiding principle, not even a philosophical one, to explain how responsibility should be divided. The implicit assumption is, in fact, that voters are not qualified to deal with any matters beyond their immediate experience, and that the only decisions taken on each level are those that directly affect the life of the constituency. “Regarding larger matters that go beyond the borders of their immediate experience, it is very difficult for the masses to gain a correct grasp” (p. 466). This is a highly elitist system, the most worrying aspect of which is that it relies on the spontaneous generation of a social elite to foster democracy, rather than on an institutionalised system of checks and balances. Although Wang insists that this system will ensure that China does not break apart by guaranteeing both autonomy and cohesion (p. 468), one cannot help but wonder whether China and Xinjiang would not be better served at the outset by a full implementation of China’s own Autonomy Law, to be completed by other guarantees of the rights of minorities as set out in international laws and norms. Interestingly enough, while he is so wary of representative democracy, Wang Lixiong entirely trusts his own electoral system to guarantee individual and collective rights by its intrinsic mechanisms rather than by formalised norms (p. 469).

For these reasons, although Wang Lixiong has gone further than most Chinese intellectuals in exploring the rights and claims of ethnic minorities and how they fit into the political problems of China as a whole, this book remains somewhat disappointing. It is true that he paints a sympathetic portrait of “ordinary Uyghurs,” far removed from the usual clichés of official discourse, exoticism, or commonly repeated slurs -- an important accomplishment that may act as bridge towards even-minded ordinary Han Chinese citizens. But just as he portrayed Tibetans as prone to blindly following Maoism as a new religion during the Cultural Revolution, smashing their own temples and Buddhas, and then blindly reviling Mao when he proved not to have been a god after his death,[3] his view of Uyghur intellectuals as influenced by terrorism and Islam seems excessively culturalist in relation to modern, secular Xinjiang. His analyses of several issues appear uninformed. Leaving aside academic research, he is weak on government policy; a close reading of Hu Jintao’s readily available 2005 speech to the State Commission on Ethnic Affairs could have yielded important insights: one of Hu’s central tenets is that any form of increased autonomy remain subordinate to the “three inseparables.”[4]

Nonetheless, Wang’s openness to dialogue and public discussion of his ideas, without any taboos or prerequisites, is an important step towards weaving the concerns of Uyghurs or Tibetans into the debate on the democratisation of China -- taking into account, of course, that the present book cannot be published on the mainland. In this capacity, as also demonstrated by his March 2008 initiative on Tibet, Wang Lixiong is one of the closest examples of a public intellectual in China. In this context, his writings also demonstrate that, despite what the Chinese government publicly states, there is no consensus in China over the fact that no price is too high to ensure that the CCP remains the dominant force in Xinjiang or Tibet. His ideas may even trickle, gradually and windingly, to the corridors of power. Wang Lixiong opposes independence for both Xinjiang and Tibet, but his willingness to discuss practical measures such as migration restrictions or enhanced religious freedom also serves as a reminder that Chinese intellectuals are not necessarily Han nationalists.

Part 2 of 2.
The full text of this review essay is published in China Perspectives, no. 2008/4. The author is a researcher at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China.

[1] Wang Lixiong, “Zhuceng dijin zhi yu minzhu zhi: Jiejue Xizang wenti de fangfa bijiao” (A Successive Multilevel Electoral System vs. a Representative Democratic System: Relative advantages for resolving the Tibet Question ), http://www.boxun.com/hero/wanglx/6_1.shtml (19 September 2008).
[2] The Autonomy Law is available on http://www.gov.cn/test/2005-07/29/content_18338.htm. See also: Information Office of the State Council, “History and Development of Xinjiang,” May 2003, http://news.xinhuanet.com/zhengfu/2003-06/12/content_916306.htm.
[3] This is the object of the debate between Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakyar. See Wang Lixiong, “Reflections on Tibet,” art. cit., and the rebuttal: Tsering Shakyar, “Blood in the Snow,” New Left Review, no. 15, May-June 2002. The gist of Tsering Shakyar’s argument is that Mao-worship in Tibet was no more blind than elsewhere in China, and that traditional Tibetan society remained dynamic and changing despite its religious characteristics. Woeser also documents the importance of the Mao-cult among Tibetans in Shajie: Forbidden Memory: Tibet during the Cultural Revolution (Taipei, Dakuai wenhua, 2007).
[4] The “three inseparables” (sange libukai) are: the Han cannot be separated from minorities, the minorities cannot be separated from the Han, and the minorities cannot be separated one from another. See: “Hu Jintao zai Zhongyang minzu gongzuo huiyi shang de jianghua” [Hu Jintao’s Speech at the Central Nationalities Working Committee], May 27, 2005, http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/1024/3423605.html (12 August 2008).

Can China Go High-Tech When Exports Slump?

By Yu Zhou

As the financial Tsunami batter China’s exporting hubs, everyone is wondering how well China can weather the storm in the next couple of years, but a more important question is how China’s economy will emerge after the crisis. As a result of extensive research, I argue that there have been sustained forces pushing China’s industry to more innovative fields with a stronger orientation to the domestic market. The crisis will only strengthen the shift in a more dramatic manner.

This conclusion is based on my research in Beijing’s Zhongguancun, a region dedicated to innovative industry and domestic market. I started to do research in Beijing’s Zhongguancun in 2000, at a time when few foreigners had ever heard of the place. But most Chinese had, due to the hype from the official media that Zhongguancun was going to become China’s Silicon Valley. Yet, knowledgeable Chinese knew that Silicon Valley had grown up around such technology giants as Intel, HP, or Google. Zhongguancun, in contrast, seemed to be a collection of gigantic electronic markets and untold numbers of venders parading pirated CDs. They are very skeptical of this government claim.

Undaunted, I continued to collect information and interview all sorts of companies in Zhongguancun, private, foreign-owned, state-owned, returnees owned, and I found that there indeed was more to Zhongguancun than meets the eyes. I had grown up in this region in the 1980s and witnessed its first transformation from a quiet suburb of universities and research institutes to a bustling high-tech commercial center. By 2000, it was gathering energy again with the internet boom. My fascination and research in this region lasted for six years and resulted in a book: The Inside Story of China’s High-Tech Industry: Making Silicon Valley in Beijing. Today, Zhongguancun is still far from Silicon Valley, but it has put its name on the international map. A number of companies started there have gained international attention, such as Lenovo and Baidu, and venture capitalists from California flood into China’s most promising land for innovative business today.

In my book, I challenge the prevailing view that foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) and export are the driving forces for technological progress in China. I argue that indigenous companies are likely to be the future technological leaders in China. The most successful of them have taken advantage of their understanding of the Chinese market with their access to competitive, reliable, and high-quality component suppliers—the same suppliers for MNCs in exports. The synergy between China’s massive export facilities and rapid growing domestic market allowed Chinese companies to make special designs, pricing and marketing methods that worked best within China to beat foreign brands competition. This is the common story of Lenovo, Huawei and many other successful Chinese high-tech companies.

More significantly, the growth of Zhongguancun is not marked by the emergence of a few strong firms, but by succeeding generations of them. The first wave was the spin-offs from universities and research institutes in the mid 1980s. These were primitive commercial companies with extremely limited international contact. But they managed to take over the lead of China’s high-tech commercial development from state-owned sectors, and firmly set China in the global technological mainstream. The second generation was computer hardware manufacturing firms such as Lenovo, which was able to establish its domestic leadership amid strong foreign competition in the mid 1990s. These were followed by internet startups in the late 1990s to 2000s, which to this day dominate China’s internet market in every category.

The current wave is much more diverse, including multimedia firms, chip design, software export and other more technically sophisticated companies, often started up by overseas returnees with overseas venture capital. Each generation has gained more technical, management and capital competence, and each followed more closely the tidal waves of the Chinese market and global technological trends. Zhongguancun’s development is a fascinating story, with many colorful characters and successions of generations over a brief period and, though my book is academic in nature, I have attempted to capture this lively story with ethnographic details that heighten the book’s readability.

For those who would like to learn more, I summarize below some of the conclusions from my book:

1. Foreign multinational firms (MNCs) have limits in bringing technological transformation in China. Chinese firms have a competitive edge in their home market.
We often assume that if a large multinational company, say HP or Google, are successful in America and elsewhere, then they should also be successful in China. If they are not, we blame the Chinese government for creating an unlevel playing field between Chinese and foreign firms. But the reality is that China is a vast, regionally fragmented, rapidly evolving and largely low-income market. It is challenging for MNCs to reach beyond China’s affluent core. In contrast, Chinese domestic firms understand their home court better and have greater commitment and flexibility. They are also learning fast from MNCs in China. While they certainly are not on the cutting-edge, they have been extraordinarily effective in bringing new technology to the Chinese market at an affordable price. Their learning ability should not be underestimated.

2. The key constraint for Chinese companies to produce cutting-edge innovation is the Chinese market, but this will change.
Many believe that the lack of innovation by Chinese companies has to do with their low R&D capacity. This is only partly true. It is worthwhile to remember that almost all Chinese technological companies were built after the mid 1980s—which is when China’s technological industry began. Most have emerged only in the 1990s. The short history set them apart from existing business powerhouses in Japan, South Korea, and even India.

But beyond the inexperience and capital and technical gap, the key constraint for Chinese companies to innovate is the Chinese market. Michael Porter in his book The Competitiveness Advantage of Nations argues that it is the quality of the domestic market that is critical for national competitiveness. A technologically sophisticated market pushes innovation by forcing companies to constantly upgrade their products. Yet Chinese consumers value low-price and lack experiences with many products. This means that most have yet to attach the same importance to the quality, design, and newness of products that consumers in advanced economies do. This provides little incentive and reward for cutting-edge innovation by domestic companies.

It is not surprising, indeed it should be expected, that most Chinese companies concentrate on following the MNCs’ lead in making products cheaper and better suited to Chinese customers rather than blazing their own paths. But as the market evolves with sustained higher income and more sophisticated consumer tastes, one can bet that Chinese companies will evolve with it by offering more innovative products.

3. The competition between Chinese indigenous firms and MNCs is not a zero sum game.
Observers inside and outside China tend to view the competition between MNCs and domestic firms as one side trying to eat the other’s lunch. But the prevailing pattern is actually a relationship of collaboration. Virtually no Chinese products are made without MNCs’ components. This is true for hardware and software. China’s most popular enterprise management software by UFIDA, a domestic company, has an Oracle database in it. As domestic companies cultivate and expand the market, MNCs have an enlarged consumer base for their products.

MNCs also learned from local firms’ marketing expertise to enhance their market performance. For example, when Nokia and Motorola suffered setbacks from Chinese cell phone manufactures in 2002-04, they managed to regain the high-end of the market by adjusting marketing strategies in part modeled after local competitors. Overall, the increasing involvement of MNCs in China in the past twenty years has been accompanied by, and indeed dependent upon the growing competence of Chinese local companies.

Some Chinese critics lament the lack of innovation in China and they imagine that if only Chinese scientists put their minds to innovation with ample state funding, innovation would take place. The truth is that given globalization and the lagging state of China, domestic companies cannot generate new technology unless they work with MNCs. Only MNCs can demonstrate how technology, marketing, and human resources are managed in the modern world. They provide Chinese companies with the knowledge of rules and skills the Chinese market has yet to provide. The technological dynamics displayed by returnee-founded enterprises nowadays exemplify how indispensible the international linkages are for cutting-edge innovation in China.

4. The critical role of the Chinese state is not to lead technological change, but to be an honest and responsible collaborating partner with other technological agents.
Analysts tracking Chinese technological changes often regard the Chinese state as the decisive actor. Outside China, China’s success in economic development is frequently credited to the Chinese state policies, and Chinese failure in creating frontier technology breakthroughs is also blamed on its authoritarian system. Within China, some Chinese scholars believe that China has become too dependent on Western technology and China’s private sector is incapable of moving into long-term R&D, so they advocate a more direct role for the state. It is not uncommon to hear Chinese officials referring to China’s success in producing nuclear bombs and a satellite in the 1960s as a model for technological breakthroughs. Unfortunately, this argument shows little understanding of the difference between military and civilian technology, or of the reality of the global marketplace in which Chinese companies must operate. A nuclear bomb does not have to stand the test of open global competition; a computer chip does. China’s state-directed satellite and technology research prior to the mid-1980s had a very poor record in responding to market needs. Given the intensity of globalization today, a state-centered approach to R & D would be counterproductive, if not simply unfeasible.

This is not to deny that the role of the state is instrumental. In China, as in other developing countries, the question is never whether the state should play a role in technological development, but how. Zhongguancun’s experience shows us the state’s crucial roles are not in being leaders, but in collaborating effectively with other technological agents and learning to reform regional institutions under changed circumstances. The accomplishments of China’s Silicon Valley thus far cannot be attributed primarily to the Chinese government.

Domestic companies and MNCs alike have spent considerable energy pushing the state to change its resource allocation, ease its restrictions, and alter its regulations. Over the years, the Chinese state has largely been responsive and tolerant of the various experiments in the region, setbacks notwithstanding. But the state has not gone far enough. In the long run, genuine innovation can only come from freedom of thought, experimentation, collective effort, and frequent exchanges with advanced technological parties and marketplaces. All that will require the Chinese government to continue to collaborate with—rather than supervise or direct—other parties. Only then can a fairer and more open institutional structure for fostering innovation can be built.

China’s path into high-tech will not be easy, but one should never underestimate the capacity of Chinese enterprises in learning and competing in their domestic market, which will eventually move them toward a more innovative trajectory.

Yu Zhou teaches geography at Vassar College.

Mo Yan, Inaugural Newman Laureate, Honored in Oklahoma

By Haiyan Lee

On Thursday, March 5, the acclaimed Chinese novelist Mo Yan received the inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese Literature at a ceremony held on the campus of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Over a hundred invited guests attended the event, including the Chinese consul from Houston, the Oklahoma secretary of state, OU’s deans of arts and sciences, OU faculty, high school teachers, students, alumni, visitors, and donors.

The Newman Prize was created in 2008 in OU’s Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the initiative of its director Peter H. Gries, Professor of political science and author of China’s New Nationalism, who sought my collaboration as consultant and jury coordinator. Our vision was to award the prize biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry by a living author writing in Chinese. Last summer, we assembled a jury of seven distinguished literary experts who nominated seven candidates, read their representative works, and selected the winner in a transparent voting process (details are available here).

As the inaugural laureate, Mo Yan received a commemorative medallion, a certificate, and $10,000. The prize is the first major American award for Chinese literature. Speaking at the award ceremony, Peter Gries retold the story Lu Xun’s conversion to literature that he first encountered at Middlebury College in the “Preface to Nahan/Call to Arms” and called the prize his “call-to-arms”: “It is my hope that the prize will contribute to increased American awareness of the tremendous diversity and humanist spirit of contemporary Chinese literature, and help generate goodwill in U.S.-China relations.”

Mo Yan was nominated by the prominent translator Howard Goldblatt, who also translated his latest and winning novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. “Of all the facets of Mo Yan’s oeuvre that have made him one of China’s foremost novelists and an internationally renowned figure—from diverse writing styles to his remarkable imagery and brilliant use of language—for me it is his historical imagination, an ability to create an alternative human history, that sets him apart from his peers. Artistry and humanity blend seamlessly in novels and stories that will be read and enjoyed well into the future,” said Howard Goldblatt last September. The novel was fondly reviewed by Jonathan Spence for the New York Times Book Review in May 2008, who considered it “wildly visionary and creative.”

In addition to attending the award ceremony and giving a moving acceptance speech, Mo Yan also visited several high schools in Norman, Oklahoma City, Moore, and Tulsa. Prior to the visits, the students had read a short story by Mo Yan entitled “Soaring” about a young woman literally taking flight in order to escape an arranged marriage. An essay contest was held and an exchange student from Kosovo emerged as the first winner of the Newman Young Writers Award. In front of his eager youthful audiences, Mo Yan read from his story (with Howard Goldblatt reading the translation) and engaged in a spirited Q&A with me as interpreter. The discussions ranged from the symbolism of dog’s blood to the meaning of life.

A symposium was also held on March 5 featuring presentations by Howard Goldblatt, Alexander Huang (Pennsylvania State University), Liu Hongtao, and myself. Together we discussed Mo Yan’s creative career and his contributions to modern Chinese literature. In place of a keynote speech, Mo Yan opted for a more casual style, regaling the audience with witty remarks and juicy anecdotes about writing, censorship, Hollywood movies, and his friend Zhang Yimou. He revealed that he had offered a proposal to Zhang for the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Zhang adopted its gist without, however, giving him due credit. “If the Olympics were to come to China again,” bragged Mo Yan, “I’d become a director myself.”

The inaugural jury consisted of seven jurors based in the U.S., Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They were: Kirk Denton (Ohio State University), Howard Goldblatt (University of Notre Dame), Liu Hongtao (Beijing Normal University), Peng Hsiao-yen (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), Xu Zidong (Lingnan University, Hong Kong), Zhang Yiwu (Beijing University), and Zhao Yiheng (Sichuan University). They nominated the following seven writers and representative works: Yan Lianke’s Dreams of Ding Village (2006), Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), Jin Yong’s The Deer and the Cauldron (1969-1972), Zhu Tianxin’s Old Capital (1997), Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2000), Wang Meng’s The Transformer (1985), and Ning Ken’s The City of Masks (2001).

The nominees included well-established maestros as well as rising stars based in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The genres and themes were wide-ranging: from magical realist renditions of the Chinese countryside caught up in the turmoil of land reforms and market reforms, a historical panorama that both crowns and radically revises the martial-arts novel tradition, a postcolonial exploration of city and memory, an epic portrayal of modern Shanghai as condensed in the life of a former Miss Shanghai turned petty urbanite, and a satire about the predicament of the semi-colonial intellectual, to Internet-installment fiction about drifters and seekers. The diversity and strength of the nominations posed a great challenge for the jury. Yet Mo Yan emerged as the consensus winner after four rounds of positive elimination voting.

The Newman Prize honors Harold J. and Ruth Newman, whose generous endowment of a chair at the University of Oklahoma enabled the creation of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues. OU is also home to World Literature Today, a leading journal of world literature, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which served as our model. A special section of the July issue of WLT, guest-edited by myself, will be dedicated to Mo Yan; it will feature his acceptance speech, newly translated short fiction, and the symposium essays. In 2010, a new jury will be assembled to select a poet as the next Newman laureate.

Stay tuned.

Chinese Intellectuals and the Problem of Xinjiang

Review of Wang Lixiong: Wo de Xiyu, ni de Dongtu, Taipei, Dakuai wenhua (Locus Publishing), 2007, 472 pp.

By Sebastian Veg

It is a common assumption that Chinese intellectuals, however critical of their government, its institutions, and its policies, are unreceptive to calls for greater self-government, much less independence, in China’s autonomous regions, most notably Tibet and Xinjiang. It is therefore worth taking note of Wang Lixiong’s book on Xinjiang, published in 2007 in Taiwan, the title of which can be rendered as My Far West, Your East Turkistan.

Wang Lixiong is no newcomer to the question, having devoted the past two decades to researching and reflecting on the place of “ethnic minorities” in China’s political system, in particular in view of its possible democratization. Born in 1953, Wang took part in the Democracy Wall movement in 1978 and, in the aftermath of 1989, published the “political fantasy” novel Huang Huo (Yellow Peril or Yellow Disaster) under the name Baomi (1991; an English translation was published as China Tidal Wave, translated by Matthew Dillon, Hawaii UP, 2007). In the 1990s, he began researching and writing a book-length study of Tibet, published in 1998 under the title Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet (Tianzang: Xizang de mingyun), and resigned from the Writers’ Association in 2001. In a follow-up to the book, he met the Dalai Lama (in the United States) for a series of talks, published in 2002 under the title Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Yu Dalai Lama duihua).

Wang Lixiong and the Dalai Lama
Wang Lixiong first began to study Xinjiang in 1999, when he travelled there to prepare research for a book along the lines of Sky Burial. He was arrested for photocopying an internal publication, stamped as “secret,” on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (the notorious bingtuan), and attempted suicide in a high-security prison in Miquan before recanting and promising to collaborate in order to obtain his release. He recorded the incident in a short essay entitled Memories of Xinjiang (Xinjiang zhuiji), published in 2001 and reprinted as an introduction to the present volume. In prison, he shared a cell with a Han prisoner accused of economic crimes (“Uncle Chen”), and a Uyghur prisoner arrested in Beijing for organizing a demonstration protesting discrimination (Mokhtar), with whom he entered into a long and ongoing discussion on Xinjiang that forms the backbone of the book.

In the form of memories of prison conversations with Mokhtar, Wang Lixiong sketches out a preliminary analysis of the “Xinjiang problem,” which he believes has entered a phase of “Palestinization.” He begins with some anecdotal examples of what he calls the Han “colonial attitude,” citing the resistance to “Urumchi time”[1] among local Hans, and their worship of Wang Zhen (1908-1993), Party secretary of Xinjiang from 1949 to 1955.[2]

While in Mao’s times all “nationalities” were submitted to equal oppression, Wang concludes that since the 1990s, which he isolates as a turning point, Uyghurs feel they have not benefited from the same treatment as the Han. After 1989, the Center adopted a “nip all destabilizing elements in the bud” policy (Ba yiqie bu wending de yinsu xiaomie zai mengya zhuangtai, p. 66), and increasingly resorted to pan-Chinese nationalism, strengthening the sympathies of Xinjiang’s Han population, but increasingly alienating Uyghurs. Wang writes:

I have always been surprised at the government’s wishful thinking in believing it could merge China’s 56 nationalities into one under the artificial concept of “the Chinese nation” [Zhonghua minzu], and make them face the outside world with an identical outlook. (…) On the contrary, each nationality can also use nationalism for its own goals, strengthen its internal cohesion through nationalism, and justify separatism and independence in its name.” (p. 59-60)

Wang shares the view of a nationalist or at least cultural-nationalist revival in Chinese political discourse, initiated by Deng Xiaoping and reinforced after 1989. One may note that the main themes of this discourse (five thousand years of history, the “humiliation” of the Opium War and imperialism, anti-Japanese feelings) are not particularly conducive to appropriation by other ethnic groups, and indeed are sometimes downright detrimental (e.g., the emphasis on the Qing empire and the civilisation it purportedly brought to frontier regions such as Xinjiang).

In this sense, Wang believes that the “Xinjiang problem” is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 61) in which an important role was played by the famous yet still mysterious “Document No. 7” issued in March 1996, the first to conflate separatism with “illegal religious activity.” In this situation of mutual distrust, all efforts to stimulate the economy, no matter how profitable, were inevitably seen as colonialism. And in fact, Wang concludes that Han inhabitants of Xinjiang were able to reap an overwhelming share of the benefits. New Han farmers took over the land from Uyghur farmers, effectively colonizing Xinjiang’s agriculture. From 1990 to 2000, according to official statistics, the Han population in Xinjiang increased by 1.8 million people, or over 30 percent.

This introduction is followed by three other substantial sections. The first is a travelogue of Wang’s four subsequent trips to Xinjiang between 2003 and 2006. It is followed by another long dialogue between Wang and Mokhtar. The final part is comprised of three “Letters to Mokhtar,” which conclude the conversation and sum up Wang’s main points regarding the difficulties of Xinjiang independence.

Wang Lixiong does not write as an academic, nor does he give much background, even of a journalistic nature, but draws only on his conversations with various people in Xinjiang. Although somewhat problematic, this no doubt makes his findings more accessible to ordinary readers, and more plausible to Chinese readers who are not knowledgeable on the subject.

He thus reports with considerable first-hand detail on deepening urban segregation and growing nepotism and corruption, highlighting the monopoly on mineral water held by Party Secretary Wang Lequan’s[3] son-in-law. He then goes on to highlight three main aspects of Xinjiang’s socio-political system: the colonial economy and control of resources by Han officials (in particular within the bingtuan system), the education system, and more generally the politics of cultural uniformization, concluding that government policy on Xinjiang requires urgent revision.

Part 1 of 2.

The full text of this review essay is published in China Perspectives, 2008.4.

[1] In 1980, the Xinjiang People’s Congress decided to switch to “Urumchi time,” two hours behind Beijing time, but abandoned the idea in the face of resistance by local Hans.
[2] When Wang Zhen, State Vice-President and one of the “Eight Immortals” (influential in the 1989 crackdown) died, his ashes were scattered in the Tianshan mountains in accordance with his wishes. Uyghurs manifested their outrage by refusing to drink water from the Tianshan, which they believed had been sullied.
[3] Politburo member Wang Lequan became deputy Party secretary for Xinjiang in 1992 and acting secretary in 1994, and has served as full Secretary since 1995, in violation of the official policy to rotate provincial secretaries at least every ten years.

Wolf Totem revisited (yet again)

I know that this site has run more than its fair share of commentaries on Wolf Totem already, including both a negative review and a piece defending the novel. I've even done one piece about it already myself, which took the form of a wrap-up look at the widely varied responses it generated in different quarters. It might seem that enough is enough, but I can't resist slipping in one more short post, due to a new award that this work is up for that some people who thought it shouldn't have gotten earlier prizes might be rooting for it to win: the 2009 Delete Key Award for Bad Writing.

I learned about this nomination from a comment that Janice Harayda--the one-time book editor for the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer who now runs the entertaining and informative site, "One-Minute Book Reviews," that's sponsoring the prize in question--posted recently at China Beat. (This just goes to show that many of us at the blog do pay attention to those comments, even if we aren't always quick on the keyboard in terms of responding to those about our own pieces--I know I can be slow to do this.) Harayda offers a wonderfully concise rationale for Wolf Totem's inclusion on her short list, and also offers up for this book (as for many others) a "Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide" to it. Definitely worth checking both of these out, but a word of warning: the site, which I've just discovered, seems like the type that offers the sort of serious fun for the intellectually curious that could easily become addictive.

p.s. I find it particularly appropriate to use a posting about Wolf Totem to draw attention to a site many of our readers might not know about (after all, it only very occasionally focuses on any sort of Chinese theme), since Jiang Rong's novel was the focus back when the New York Times' "Paper Cuts: A Blog about Books" ran its first piece telling readers about China Beat (a site that runs many posts that aren't about books). So, there's a nice working of Karma here, which, whatever else one has to say about Wolf Totem, is definitely a point in its favor.

p.p.s. I was going to vow that I would never again mention the book on this site, but I might not be able to resist the temptation of doing so, if only to update our readers on whether it "wins" this latest prize.

In Case You Missed It: Passion of the Mao

By Jeremiah Jenne

Passion of the Mao is the quirky documentary produced by Lee Feigon based on his book Mao: A Reinterpretation. There's some things to like about the film. I appreciated the irreverence, and there were a number of chuckle-worthy jokes and sly references as well as several precipitous descents into banal toilet and body humor. (Some of which, for awhile, are also pretty chuckle-worthy.) Mao's writings are referenced throughout the film, though Mr. Feigon's choice to have them read using a voiceover that recalled the worst of the Fu Manchu films from early Hollywood is odd. Mr. Feigon also gives prominence to Mao's fondness for scatological references and bawdy language. It's funny and raunchy and, for the most part, unnecessary. Mao was the kind of guy who liked young girls, disliked bathing, and enjoyed the occasional fart joke. Okay, I got it. Next.

In terms of history, the first half of the film is quite good. The occasional surrealist cartoon or madcap aside doesn't distract from a pretty solid narrative that hits the high points of Mao's early career, a narrative which is interwoven nicely with the larger story of the Communist Revolution. But like that revolution, the movie starts to veer off course after we get to 1949. Mr. Feigon does well to reminds us that the early years of the 1950s were ones of economic growth and relative peace (though not so much if you were declared a landlord or a rightist). His treatment of elite politics in this era centers on a portrayal of Peng Dehuai as a "Judas" figure whose long-standing grudge against Mao led to an ill-fated showdown at Lushan. It's an intriguing re-telling of the Mao-Peng dynamic, but to cast Peng as having sold out Mao for 30 pieces of Soviet silver in this CCP passion play comes off a bit disingenuous given that there is little (if any) mention of the downfall of Lin Biao.

And it is this decision to minimize events from the latter part of the 1960s and 1970s that is perhaps the film's greatest flaw. For all the antics, animation, and toilet humor, Mr. Feigon has a serious point to make: Perhaps we've misunderstood the Cultural Revolution all along, that it wasn't that bad, and that any evidence to the contrary is the result of the wrong people ending up in power following Mao's death. Mr. Feigon dismisses Red Guard violence as an early setback in the movement, and chooses instead to focus on statistics which suggest increased educational access, economic growth, and industrial output during the 1966-1976 period. He doesn't say where the numbers come from and if he's using CCP figures from that era then obviously we must maintain a certain healthy skepticism.

The hypothesis that the political interests of Deng Xiaoping and his allies in the post-GPCR period have shaped the discussion and discourse about the Cultural Revolution is an intriguing one, and it is a not-so-subtle subtext of the movie that Mr. Feigon views the current government and the legacy of Deng Xiaoping with great disdain. In this way, he reminds me of protesters in China today who hold up pictures of The Chairman as a whip against the current government, one which is seen as more a product of Deng Xiaoping's reformist policies than of Mao's revolutionary vision.

In the end, while I enjoyed the beginning of Mr. Feigon's movie, the casual glossing of the Cultural Revolution was disturbing to me. I have met and talked to too many people who still cannot shake terrible memories of that period. I know families still riven by animosity over events which occurred forty years earlier. I'm willing to accept that the collective and official memory of the Cultural Revolution and Mao was influenced by the political needs of Deng Xiaoping, but in this movie Mr. Feigon himself commits the error of "Leaning too far to one side" and is a bit too blasé about an event which caused great pain and suffering for many people. In the end, it will take more than fart jokes and film parodies to save Mao's legacy.

Time Machine: Dear US Presidential Candidates…

By Robert A. Kapp

February, 2009: we are in the early days of a new Administration, and the Internet and print media bulge with messages of advice to the new President and the new Secretary of State about how to deal with China. Some of the missives are Olympian. Others are avuncular. They serve multiple purposes, and seek to reach multiple audiences.

Reading them, I was reminded of one of my own exercises of a similar nature, in the fall of the year 2000. Eight long years; so much has happened. Then, we were only a couple of months beyond the huge political battle over extending Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China – a Hill struggle brought the most strident arguments over China to the forefront of American attention.

Before that, in reverse chronological order, lay the Lee Wen Ho case; the Cox Commission and its allegations of Chinese nuclear theft; the Hughes-Loral furor over alleged transfer of military rocketry knowledge to China; Johnny Chung, John Huang, Charlie Trie and the scandal over “campaign finance.” Amid all that had come the Belgrade Embassy bombing and the siege of the Sasser embassy. Only a couple of years earlier had occurred the PRC missile tests off northern Taiwan and the sending of the Seventh Fleet to waters off Taiwan. Among the colorful Congressional comments along the way, in 1999, came the denunciation of the PRC leadership as a bunch of “child molesters.” One very well known Member of Congress, in a speech to members of his own party the same year, referred to the “big wet kissup” of the Clinton regime to Beijing as nothing short of “the full Lewinsky.”

Thus the immediate background to my open-letter message to our presidential candidates at the time, George W. Bush and Al Gore. China Beat readers can form their own judgments, eight-plus long years later, as to where the U.S. and China have been and where we have come, and whether this particular “advice” from a receding moment in time still burns, or whether it merely flickers feebly in the cooling embers of another era.

This piece was originally published in the September-October 2000 issue of China Business Review.

Dear US Presidential Candidates…

Congratulations on securing your parties' nominations for the presidency. You have embarked on a deeply personal journey in which hundreds of millions have a vital stake. We wish you health and fulfillment in the campaign and, to the winner, we wish success in a tough job with unequalled potential for enhancing the well-being of all Americans…

…As you conduct your campaigns and prepare to serve the nation, I hope you don't mind my offering a few personal thoughts on America's future with China and the critical role of the president in shaping that future.

1. The United States and China must work at building a world system in which China is, for the first time in our 225-year history, a force to be reckoned with. Even if we wanted to, it is now impossible to shunt China back into its nineteenth- and twentieth-century identity: impoverished, self-isolated, riven by civil war, assaulted by more powerful states, or imprisoned in Marxist-Leninist doctrinarism. Those days are over. There is no going back. The United States and China must either find the means to maintain a civil and respectful bilateral relationship in a shrinking and perilous world, or face the consequences of their failure.

2. China must not be an American afterthought. Maintaining a productive relationship with China should rank high on the American agenda. Leaving US-China relations far down on the totem pole of US concerns will not serve our national interest well.

3. The greatest danger we face in our relations with China is the danger of unfamiliarity and of its partners, fear of the unknown and unwarranted casualness. Engagement with China is demanding, but it's not extraterrestrial. We must grapple with a deeply ingrained habit of relegating China to the periphery of our national consciousness, except in moments of crisis; of assuming that China (or for that matter Asia as a whole) is somehow so exotic (or, as one Cabinet member once put it to me, "so darned far away") that we need not place a priority on engaging with it day in and day out. Paying attention to relations with China only when something bad happens, or only when a domestic political storm breaks out, is a recipe for unnecessary tensions.

4. The president must frame American relations with China. There is simply no substitute for presidential energy on this. If he does not lead, others will fill the void: elected figures of more limited constituency, for whom China sometimes represents opportunity without responsibility; members of the media, who provide Americans with a fraction of one minute's worth of information about China on any given day and who thrive on pungent momentary "news"; interest groups--business, labor, the non-governmental community--all of which have a role to play, but none of which can substitute fully for presidential leadership in the making of sensitive and far-reaching American policy decisions.

5. Presidential leadership on China requires hard work. The president must communicate to the American people about our relations with China, even when there is no crisis and no triumph. He must also communicate successfully with the Chinese, a very different audience. But before he communicates, the president must "know himself and know the other side," as an old Chinese saying goes. It is not impossible, but it takes time and care. It takes meeting the Chinese. It takes seeing China. It takes consensus-building. It requires allocation of precious talent and time within an administration inevitably beset by limitless demands for both.

6. Far-reaching affinity will not come easily to nations as different as the United States and China. Happily, the world has created a number of structures and systems, including the World Trade Organization, to maintain predictable and stable relations among vastly different nations. China in the past 20 years has committed itself increasingly to participation in the world's principal economic and political regimes. Wherever possible, the president should position the United States to encourage China's growing commitment to multilateral regimes and norms. He should both ensure that the United States accords China the respect that full participation in international regimes entails, and do his utmost to ensure that China reciprocally displays the same respect and lives up to its own responsibilities.

7. At home, the president must not allow himself to be drawn politically on China. This is perhaps the hardest domestic challenge of all.For reasons too long to describe here--including real events in China--China sound bites sometimes have special pungency in the American public consciousness. Some will paint a simplistic picture of China--a single memorable phrase, a brilliant moral call to arms, a single riveting photo--and demand that the president "take sides." They will present China as a morality play, a test of the president's fidelity to elemental values pure and simple. They will suggest that a nuanced and carefully balanced US posture with regard to China is nothing short of "appeasement" or "kowtowing to Beijing." China's political radioactivity in the United States feeds on itself. If the president is to lead on China, he must stay out of the China trap at home. But presidential leadership is itself the best way out of the China trap.

8. In guiding American relations with China, the president should understand and draw upon the skills and insights of people of Chinese descent in the United States. People have come to the United States from China for a century and a half--first as exploited coolie labor, later as refugees from war and political convulsion, more recently as students and businesspeople. Some are now tenth-generation Americans. Others are new citizens. Some know their ancestral homeland well; others are total strangers to it. Some are brilliant, others are dull. Some vote one way, others vote another. But they are Americans of Chinese heritage, and even as they contribute to America's strength, many cherish their roots and their relationships in China. Their position on the cusp of China-US cultural contact is an underutilized American asset. There is a misguided suggestion afoot in the land that Americans of Chinese origin are somehow vulnerable to the influence of a malevolent oriental despotism. The president should leave no doubt about where the nation stands on this, and should enhance our nation's ability to manage its relations with China by drawing upon our country's Chinese-American resources.

9. The president needs to lead the nation in recognizing that China, more than most countries, is a work in progress. China is in constant motion. Unchanging first principles are few, apart from an abiding sense of historical identity and a deep-seated determination to be respected by others. It is not easy, but the president must anticipate the certainty of uncertainty, the permanence of impermanence, the constancy of inconstancy, in US relations with China. That does not require suspension of ethical standards or of plain common sense. It does demand both strategic long-term vision and short-term flexibility.

10. The president must understand both the power of American example and the limits of American influence. "Sending China a Message" has proven rhetorically popular but substantively unproductive. Telling China to do as we say, on pain of economic punishment, is a fond fantasy. The American president should not take on the impossible burden of remaking China in America's image, whether from the pulpit or the cockpit. He can, though, strengthen America's influence with China. Many in China study the United States. They look for the sources of this nation's vitality and productivity. Their search has century-old roots. China's willingness to learn from American experience, and the desire to assimilate in some way America's (and other countries') strengths into China's difficult environment, is genuine. It is both a reflection and a source of American strength.

No matter which of you attains the presidency this winter, we wish you well, and we hope that that the lessons American business has learned over nearly three decades of work with China may be of service to you and your nation al leadership.

In Case You Missed It: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

A Review of Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2008)


By Eric Setzekorn

With China’s export-centered economy looking increasingly unbalanced and unsustainable, there has been growing public support for state involvement in the interests of rural development. Yasheng Huang, of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, provides a powerful economic rationale to this emerging movement with his new book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. Huang argues that urban biased government policies over the past fifteen years are the cause of skewed proportions of China’s economy and have tremendously hindered stable private sector growth. Huang debunks the consensus view that China’s economy has become increasingly open to private enterprise during the thirty year of the reform period, suggesting an alternative narrative of a resurgent state sector sidelining the vibrant, sustainable and equitable development pattern of the 1980s.

Huang centers his analysis of China’s reform period on the often neglected rural economy of the 1980s, a period he dubs the “The Entrepreneurial Decade.” To Huang, the 80s pattern of rural development of private sector labor intensive production offered the possibility of a “virtuous” development based on a trajectory commonly seen in other East Asian developing nations. The beating heart of this decade’s growth is the dynamic role played by the Township and Village Enterprises (TVE), which provide both mass employment and management opportunities for poor but entrepreneurial residents. To get TVEs off the ground, aspiring entrepreneurs either pooled capital informally or were able to access official sources due to lenient credit policies encouraged by senior party leadership.

In contrast to many observers, of which Huang singles out Joseph Stiglitz as the main offender, these organizations are shown to be functionally private operations cloaking themselves in the necessary legal fiction that they are collective entities in order to register with the government. One of the recurring themes of the book is the extent to which foreign observers continue to grossly misunderstand cultural and administrative terminology and functional differences between China and other nations, in this case misunderstanding TVEs as an organizational identifier rather than merely denoting locality.

To work around the criticism that weak property rights and government policies were still relatively unfriendly to private capitalism in the 1980s Huang articulates the notion of “Directional Liberalism.” This term encapsulates his contention that faith in property rights and recognition of profits are relative concepts, and that, although the business environment in China in the 1980s was nowhere near the standard of the Washington Consensus, incremental positive changes were nevertheless sufficient to encourage hard work and risk-taking by rural individuals when judged from a pre-1978 perspective. The representative Horatio Alger figure in Huang’s narrative of this period is Nian Guangjiu, a rural entrepreneur who successfully brands his sunflower seeds as “Idiot Seeds” and quickly expands from four workers in Anhui to hundreds of employees distributing seeds across China. In 1989, Nian Guangjiu was arrested on vague charges of hooliganism and immoral relationships during the post-Tiananmen crackdown, and like Nian the initial, balanced stage of China’s reform development came to an end and the urban-centric 1990s began.

Where the story of the 1980s was fundamentally about the rural private-sector, the following decade was dominated by a shift to capital-intensive, state-directed urban development described in the chapter titled “The Great Reversal.” It is in the analysis of the 1990s where Huang significantly deviates from conventional narratives of China’s private sector growth, which focus on the private sector’s increasing share of output rather than his preferred method: using measures of capital inputs to determine the policy environment. Per Huang’s interpretation, fears that the economy is moving outside the control of the party’s leadership led the state to increase its role in the setting of investment priorities, for example by shoring up SOEs, building urban infrastructure, and initiating national prestige projects.

This policy shift reflected the post-1989 leadership transition, which saw pragmatic, patient reformers with experience in rural areas replaced by a bevy of Shanghai technocrats and risk-averse party apparatchiks. The result was a steady squeezing of entrepreneurs through more restrictive government regulations and tighter macro-economic policy controls which limited private access to credit. As a consequence of this gradual restricting of opportunity in the countryside, the rural population became a pool of cheap, migrant labor rather than potential entrepreneurs. Locked out of asset appreciation and forced to rely only on unskilled labor positions to supplement their income, rural residents net income growth rates plummeted both in absolute terms and relative to urban households.

The end result of this statist investment bias was the rapid but hollow development of showroom cities, which Huang pointedly skewers in the final substantive chapter “What is Wrong with Shanghai?” In chart after chart, Huang successfully makes the case that the development of Shanghai into a world-class city that receives global praise for its infrastructure and breathtaking development has harmed China’s real economic growth trajectory. Huang’s list of Shanghai’s failings is long and angry: income levels that have failed to match the rapid ascent of per capita GDP, income inequality that has continually widened since the late 1980s, a private sector starved for capital, incredible corruption in land development and infrastructure projects, a bloated, greedy government.

In summing up the city Huang writes “Shanghai represents the political triumph of the Latin American path, anchored on the prominence of statist interventions, huge urban biases, and distorted liberalism in favor of FDI at the expense of indigenous entrepreneurship. Shanghai, as the world’s most successful Potemkin metropolis, is both the sign of and the culprit for what is structurally ailing the Chinese economy today.”(230-231)

As with most works on economics, it is sometimes difficult to bridge the massive gap between common and specialized knowledge, but aside from several paragraphs groaning with statistics Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics should be readable (barely) by a general audience. The genuine outrage at what Huang feels to be an unjust and unbalanced pattern of development gives the work a passion most political economy works lack, although his depiction of some well-respected economists such as David Dollar of the World Bank can be overly harsh. Overall, the conclusions Huang arrives at are cogent and convincing; the 1980s were a vibrant era whose lessons have been ignored; China has significantly deviated from the East Asian model into a Latin American style economy; and although capitalism in China has deeper roots today than in the 1980s, the fruits of development are increasingly falling into the hands of the state or the rich.

In the midst of this depressing account, Huang seems optimistic about China’s future. He approves of the policy initiatives of the Hu-Wen government although he is unsure whether their rhetoric to re-balance and improve the livelihood of poor and rural Chinese will overcome entrenched interests. In this respect I think some of Huang’s optimism is misplaced. The recent Chinese economic stimulus package continues to favor capital intensive government industries like steel that produce prestige goods for the leadership--such as Olympic stadiums and potentially aircraft carriers--rather than rural education or healthcare. In the midst of a turbulent global economy Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics should, and judging by the initial response will make economists and policy makers pause to consider how China got into its current situation and what its proper economic objectives should be.