Readings: Expo Preparation, Food, Music, and Fashion

A variety of readings that piqued our interest this week:

1. In a New York Times story, Howard French takes a look at the ongoing preparations in Shanghai as next year’s World Expo grows closer. In addition to Expo-related construction in the city center, French notes, attention is also being paid to outlying neighborhoods, which are being spruced up in anticipation that some Expo-goers will want to explore Shanghai’s innumerable side streets and alleyways:

Shiny new aluminum facades are being hastily stapled onto grubby family storefronts, and fresh coats of paint and mortar are being applied, often for the first time in decades. This Potemkin salubrity is regarded with frank skepticism by many locals as a gigantic, government-run “face operation.” Its aim, they say, is to impress foreign visitors, even those who wander off the beaten path, with Chinese living standards.

Shanghai authorities are seeking to achieve more than just cosmetic changes, however; like Beijing did prior to the Olympics, Shanghai is also exhorting its citizens to become more “civilized” before the Expo begins.

2. It’s the height of shui mi tao, or water honey peach--“The Best Peach on Earth”-- season in China, but American consumers can’t enjoy any of these delicious treats, as Stan Sesser writes at the Wall Street Journal. U.S. markets prize long shelf life and durability in the produce they sell, and the honey peach is a delicate fruit that quickly turns rotten, so it cannot survive the long journey to American tables. The honey peach isn’t especially attractive, either, which is a further strike against it in the U.S., where fruit is bred to have a vibrant exterior color that pleases the shopper’s eye. Because of all these factors,

Growing honey peaches on U.S. farms isn't practical, either. "It can be done, but it would be very time-consuming," says [Al Courchesne, a farm owner in California], speaking of Agriculture Department regulations that require quarantine of imported fruit trees. To prevent the arrival of agricultural viruses, the USDA requires a period of isolation that could last several years, he says. When that period was over, growers would have trees bearing an ugly-looking fruit so delicate it would require special handling and rapid-fire distribution.

It appears, then, that honey peaches will remain a special treat to be enjoyed on visits to China--which is almost a novelty these days, now that so many foods are shipped around the world at the click of a mouse.

3. In more food news, organic farms are popping up in China, though their number is still small, as Joshua Frank reports in the Los Angeles Times. While organically grown food is comparatively expensive, recent tainted-food scandals have made many consumers wary and willing to pay more for peace of mind. Even large chain stores such as Carrefour have picked up on the trend: organic produce is accompanied by informational posters that chart its journey from farm to store, and staffers stand by to answer any customer questions. In Beijing, Lejen Chen and her husband have started the Community-Supported Agriculture program:

Fifteen families receive baskets of fresh seasonal vegetables, and have access to the Green Cow farm, about 20 miles from the center of Beijing, as a leisure spot.

The privilege of a year's involvement with the program costs roughly $45 a week, and families are also expected to help out with chores such as weeding and harvesting at least three times a year. The farm's crops go to program participants, and are also used to supply Chen's New York-style diner nearby.

Issues of trust, however, persist:

Conforming to organic standards when you have no control over neighbors' practices, or what rains down on you, is difficult. But on paper, China's organic farming standards are strict enough, Chen says.

The problem, she says, is making sure that farmers stick to those standards, and ensuring that there are enough authorities to adequately monitor producers who claim their food is organic--a tall order in a country where toxic, heavy-metal-filled sewage sludge is the cheapest, most easily accessible fertilizer around.

4. Over at the Fool’s Mountain blog, a recent post spotlights Louis Yu, a PhD student in theoretical computer science who also produces a weekly podcast featuring world indie music (podcast archives available at woozy.cn; Chinese only). Yu shares his thoughts on the state of indie music in China right now, which he views as a constantly evolving scene:

Most bands are just copying random Western indie bands, they don’t know WHY they’re making indie music, or rather, what indie music is. It should be craft on songs, melody, and lyrics the foremost, not styles you pick and choose from swatches because they happen to be “hip” at the moment . . .

That being said, like most things in China, Chinese indie has the ability to surprise the hell out of everybody. For one, it’s growing and progressing in such an alarming speed. I mean, the quality of the music got so much better just within the last 4-5 months, I personally can see the progress from when I first really paid attention to the Chinese indie scene a year ago, till now.

5. We previously linked to Gina Anne Russo’s post on femininity and advertising in China, in which she notes that most ads, especially provocative ones, seem to feature Western women. A story in The Guardian, however, hails the arrival of Asian supermodels on the international fashion scene (hat tip to Stylites in Beijing):

The monopoly of white models on the catwalks and in the glossies over the past decade has been immovable, but many fashionistas now believe the future is Asian. As Condé Nast prepares to launch GQ China, its fourth Chinese title, and Vogue India increases its print run to 50,000 copies a month, British model scouts say a new demand for Asian talent is being created that will transform the face of fashion . . .

It was the summer launch of Supermodelme.tv that gave Asian models a boost. The show, which appeared online in June, follows 10 aspiring models from Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and India as they compete for a prize of $10,000 and the chance of fame. Karen Seah, of Singapore-based media group Refinery Media, came up with the idea after witnessing "a growing market for Japanese and Chinese models".

Even so, modelling has yet to attract the same kudos in the south and east Asian communities as in the west. White says that many Asian girls view modelling as a "hobby" to pursue much later in life than their European counterparts. Ashanti Omkar, former editor of Asian lifestyle magazine Henna, says change will not happen overnight. "An increase in the number of Asian models is to be expected, but it will take time. Many young Asian girls don't think of modelling as a career."

Readings on Liu Xiaobo and Xu Zhiyong

News came today that legal scholar Xu Zhiyong was formally arrested last week, though he has not yet been charged, according to his lawyer (see recent China Beat posts on Xu Zhiyong here and here). Xu is one of several detainees whom netizens are seeking to free through a postcard campaign; another is Charter ’08 organizer Liu Xiaobo, who has been in custody since last December. Here are several readings related to Liu, and one on Xu, that have caught our attention:

1. Before Charter ’08, Liu Xiaobo was already well-known as a participant in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. His essay on “That Holy Word, ‘Revolution’” is posted on the website of the Tiananmen documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace. In June 2006, Liu reflected on the 17 years that had passed since the 1989 movement, expressing his dissatisfaction with “China’s Tiananmen Paranoia,” but also speaking of his hopes for the future.

2. In that essay, Liu Xiaobo briefly mentions the changes to China’s activist landscape brought by the internet. This topic is the focus of another 2006 piece by Liu, re-posted last April by the Times (UK), in which he calls the internet “God’s present to China.” While in past years Liu and his colleagues wrote essays by hand, collected petition signatures one-by-one, and bicycled great distances to find fax machines they could safely use, the introduction of new technology has completely changed their work since the late 1990s:

The internet has made it easier to obtain information, contact the outside world and submit articles to overseas media. It is like a super-engine that makes my writing spring out of a well. The internet is an information channel that the Chinese dictators cannot fully censor, allowing people to speak and communicate, and it offers a platform for spontaneous organisation.

3. During the months before last summer’s Olympic Games, quite a bit of attention was focused on the possibility of the Games having a liberalizing effect in China (Der Spiegel ran an interview with Liu on this topic). In the year since the Olympics ended, however, events like the arrests of Liu Xiaobo and Xu Zhiyong have led observers to conclude that the Games left no such legacy. "The Olympics were a delightful event with no direct, meaningful impact on altering the way China is run or where it might be heading," states scholar Russell Leigh Moses in an article run by the Ottawa Citizen.

4. Quoted in that same Ottawa Citizen article is Phelim Kine of Human Rights Watch, who authored “Free Liu Xiaobo,” at the Far Eastern Economic Review. Kine outlines the story behind Liu’s arrest, then asks

Why should Mr. Liu be charged for actions the Chinese government periodically insists are within the boundaries of the law? After all, Charter ’08’s affirmation that “freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government is the fundamental framework for protecting these values” echoes the Chinese government’s own human-rights rhetoric. China’s Constitution guarantees the freedoms of expression, assembly, and religion, and states that, “The state respects and preserves human rights.”  And on April 13, 2009, the Chinese government issued its first ever National Human Rights Action Plan which states that “The Chinese government unswervingly pushes forward the cause of human rights in China.”

So why does Mr. Liu’s reality stand in such stark contrast to the government’s rhetoric?  Because he and Charter ’08 by their very existence make that contrast painfully clear, and in doing so thoughtfully and peacefully challenge the legitimacy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. The document demonstrates that at least a wide cross section of the intelligentsia the government had long assumed it had bought, bullied or bludgeoned into submission is questioning the trade-off of economic development at the expense of fundamental human rights. Consciously modeled on Charter ’77, a document issued in 1977 by dissidents in the then-Czechoslovakia, Charter ’08 declares that the status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable.

5. Elizabeth Lynch of chinalawandpolicy.com published a piece at The Huffington Post yesterday on “Xu Zhiyong and What His Detention Means for Rule of Law in China.” Lynch argues that recent moves by the Chinese government against public interest lawyers are not simply due to a desire to control dissent before the PRC’s 60th anniversary celebration this October. Rather, Lynch states,

all of these actions paint the picture of a government that has become increasingly more alarmed by a more vocal and organized group of lawyers. The government, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which ultimately controls all governmental bodies, has begun to view the development of these non-profit lawyers and legal reform as a threat to its authority and to the one-party rule of the CCP. Recent governmental assaults on the public interest law field are not just a one-off affair. Rather, they show a CCP not looking to embrace the "rule of law," but instead seeking to contain it.

Lynch discusses Xu’s arrest in the context of the Chinese government’s increasingly conservative legal ideology, and comments on the difficulty of establishing rule of law in such an environment:

In recent months, Chinese public interest lawyers have been effectively organizing themselves, especially through the internet, to challenge the current system. However, these lawyers are far from what the rest of the world would deem radical. They are merely using the laws passed by the National People's Congress to protect people, especially those in disadvantaged groups like rural parents in Sichuan or people with AIDS. They are not looking to overturn underlying constitutional principles; they just want to enforce the law as written.

Even though these lawyers work within the system to improve Chinese society in a way that the law permits, as soon as they amass sufficient numbers, in the minds of the CCP, they are no longer operating within the legal system, but within the political one. In these situations, the CCP will abandon the legal system in favor of the political one.

Readings

There are several recent pieces on China's internet controls that are worth reading if you haven't already looked at them. First, "How China Polices the Internet" at Financial Times, gives an interesting account of what David Bandurski has called China's "Control 2.0," an increasingly adept deployment of online discourse on behalf (rather than at the expense) of the government. After vigorous online debate emerged over a Yunanese man's suspicious death while in police custody, officials did not just cut off discussion:

Wu Hao, deputy propaganda chief for the area, put out an online appeal for “netizens” to help investigate the case. Within hours, thousands had signed up. Wu picked a group of 15, among them some of the bloggers who had been most vocal in attacking the police’s behaviour and in fuelling the debate. He invited them to tour the Jinning detention facility and be briefed by the wardens. State media outlets ran stories about the bloggers entering through the heavy metal door that had banged shut behind Li three weeks earlier.

And while the blogger investigation committee couldn’t do much real investigating – its members were refused access to surveillance camera footage and to key witnesses – the stunt proved a coup for Wu. The bloggers released a report concluding that they knew too little to give a proper assessment of what had happened, while provincial prosecutors announced that Li had not died from playing blind man’s bluff but had been beaten to death by another prisoner. Soon, the debate died down.

For more on this topic, see David Bandurski's recent piece on government control of the internet, "Are China's Leaders Becoming More Responsive?", at China Media Project. Those who were not reading China Beat last summer may enjoy the tongue-in-cheek piece Bandurski published here in July 2008, "Things We'd Rather You Not Say on the Web, Or Anywhere Else":

We must not forget – and this begins with not remembering – how Zhao Ziyang said on May 6, 1989, in the midst of popular demonstrations, that propaganda leaders should “open things up just a bit.” “There is no big danger in that,” he said. His words were careless, and the end result was chaos. Nobody wants chaos. Just try to picture what it does to GDP.

Comrade Zhao, you see, failed to understand the real power of words. He failed to understand that the Party and the masses must not be too profligate with them if they are to “do the great work of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” That is why the Party had to step in afterwards to reorder your words and ideas. We have our own word for this: “guidance of public opinion.” Say it with me: “guidance of public opinion.”

Good. Now, dear citizens, I think it is best to instruct you with a couple of examples of what I mean about words. This way you will understand how to use them with responsibility and care, correctly upholding – say it with me – “GUIDANCE of PUBLIC OPINION.” Right. I hope these examples will help you remember how to forget the right things.

At her blog (now cleverly titled "Records of a Grad Historian"), Gina Anne Russo writes about what it is like to be a foreign woman in China:

I think my awareness of how most Chinese people see me comes to discussions about Sex and the City. I won't deny that I love that show, but the dangers of exporting such a liberal hyperbole of American male/female relationships became clear to me when Chinese girls began telling me that life in America is very "kaifang" or "open," just like Sex and the City. Statements about this show often are accompanied by a look of both interest and disdain; most Chinese girls admire the independence and openness with which American women can live their lives, but also consider them to be a bit too morally degenerate, which is why Chinese society is better. At first, I found these statements funny, but this quickly became something that made me incredibly angry and defensive. As a woman who is quite proud of my independence and my personal choices, I hated being pigeonholed into this "morally degenerate" category. But it seemed like a losing battle; for everyone I told that this was not the case for even most American woman, 10 other Chinese people would continue to have this same stereotype. Over time, I came to hate that show and the way it represented white American women...

And this stereotype was furthered by advertisements found all over Shanghai ... Almost all advertisements about lingerie or sexy clothing had white women; advertisements showing good wives or girlfriends in cutesy scenarios were more often than not Chinese. One particular advertisement made me feel naseous; it showed a man and a woman on top of each other, and he is about to touch in her in a way that should be R rated, and not all over the subway (meanwhile, of course, she is all bust). I thought about how the Chinese would react if that girl were not blonde, but instead Zhang Ziyi or some other Chinese star; it would have looked completely out of place. I actually wrote about this when I was writing my thesis last year, as photos in women's magazines from the 1930s had similar patterns of putting white women in more liberal situations. What I argued (and would argue still) is that this allowed the Chinese population to live vicariously in this liberal, modern society without feeling to threatened by too MUCH moral openness. In a sense, they enjoyed the idea of the liberalism, but also wanted to maintain their own standards of morality and culture, and by seeing white women act this way, their own ideas about morality weren't under threat. ...

John Pasden, who keeps the blog "Sinosplice" and also works at ChinesePod, tries an experiment with the Google translator at "Translation Party" (an enormously diverting website, particularly given, as Pasden notes, the simplicity of its concept). Here is the image Pasden shares at his website (see the original at his Flickr page):

On the Web: Images of China

China Beat readers looking for cool “new” desktop pictures for their computers might want to think old. More and more archives are digitalizing their collections of photographs and making them available online, so now finding that perfect snapshot of Old Beijing or the Great Wall couldn’t be easier. Here are just a couple of the many websites out there, and some sample photos that we found by searching for topics like “Shanghai” and “China.”

1. Friend of the blog Jeremy Friedlein (Program Director, CET Shanghai) pointed us to Life magazine photos available on Google Images. Adding “source:life” in the search box limits results to those photographs from the Life collection--a helpful hint, since searching for “Shanghai” in Google Images produces over 20 million results. In the much more manageable two hundred Life photos of Shanghai, there are plenty of street scenes, Bund panoramics, and rickshaw snapshots, as well as pictures showing the city in the last days of the civil war:



2. Jeremy also knows of our interest in the upcoming Shanghai World’s Fair, and turned our attention to more Life photos of World’s Fairs in the past:



3. The Library of Congress has a large online digital archive, which is an excellent source for photos of historic Beijing:



4. Finally, instead of looking to the past, why not imagine the future? This poster advertises a “Worlds’ Fair” to be held in Shanghai in 2474 (no, the placement of that apostrophe isn’t a typo). It doesn’t seem that the Pudong waterfront will change much, but we’re hoping that the Jetsons-style flying cars will reduce some of Shanghai’s traffic woes.

Readings for August 3

1. An important story emerged this weekend in the blogosphere: Chinese legal scholar Xu Zhiyong was taken from his home by police last Wednesday and has not been seen since. From Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

Xu might not have reached Marshall status yet, but he is as close as China gets to a public-interest icon. He teaches law at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He has also run the Open Constitution Initiative, a legal aid and research organization that worked on many of China’s path-breaking cases. He and his colleagues had investigated the Sanlu milk scandal, in which dangerous baby formula harmed children’s health, and assisted people who had been locked up by local officials in secret undeclared jails. All of those activities are emphatically consistent with the goals of the Chinese government, even if they angered the local bureaucrats who were caught in the act.

Xu has never set out to undermine one-party rule; he is enforcing rights guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution. He has enough faith in the system that he joined it: in 2003, he ran for and won a seat as a legislator in his local district assembly, one of the few independent candidates to be elected in an open, contested election. He even received the recognition, rare among activists, of being profiled last year in a Chinese newspaper. “I have taken part in politics in pursuit of a better and more civilized nation,” he said at the time. “I am determined to prove to the citizens across the country that politics should be desirable.”

His work naturally angered parts of China’s bureaucracy, and pressure on him mounted. On July 14th, the Open Constitution Initiative, also known as Gongmeng, was fined 1.42 million RMB for “tax evasion.” Then it was banned. Xu was to have had his day in court, except he was picked up before he could. Separately, a young colleague named Zhuang Lu has also been detained, and her whereabouts are unknown. It is easy to look at China’s list of high-profile detentions and rationalize them: That guy was a cowboy, or, things in China are improving, and we have to keep it in context. Sorry. Not this time. Xu is no cowboy.

James Fallows has a good collection of suggested further readings on Xu’s detention at his blog, including links to important materials at CDT and Chinese Media Project.

2. Michael Meyer has a new piece in this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated on post-Olympics Beijing:

What is the legacy of the Beijing Olympics? Western perceptions of China tend to plant their standards at the poles of enchantment and apprehension: Witness the reaction to the opening ceremonies, during which many viewers' impressions slid along a continuum of awe at the sight of thousands of drummers and flying sylphs to the uneasy realization that a production of that scale is only possible in a nation with an enormous population and resources, and a government powerful enough to mobilize them. If they can do this, what can't they do?

The performances of Chinese athletes during the Games confirmed the country's formidability. Shortly after Beijing was awarded the Olympics, in 2001, China devised Project 119—an initiative named for the number of gold medals awarded (only one to a Chinese athlete) at the 2000 Games in track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing, and canoeing and kayaking. The plan was to boost the country to the top of the medal standings. China finished with its highest total ever, 100 medals, 51 of them gold (sidebar, page 70). Only the U.S. won more, 110 total, though just 36 were gold.

Yet despite the Beijing Olympics' spectacle and success—officials claimed the Games made a $146 million profit—the capital is feeling the hangover that comes after hosting the world's biggest-ever coming-out party. Beijing is learning, as host cities have in the past, that the Games' influence is often extinguished with the torch. (The hangover was not soothed, of course, by the simultaneous near collapse of the world's economy.) A year after the Olympics, Beijing residents still cannot drink the tap water, or surf an unfiltered Internet, or exercise in safe air.

In the article, Meyer returns to the neighborhood he wrote about at length in his book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, and weaves the story of Beijing's Qianmen neighborhood with his discussion of the remnants of Olympic spirit in the capital:

The redevelopment of our neighborhood has been tabled for lack of funds. At her courtyard home, as her father's pet pigeons flap in circles overhead, my former student Little Liu, now 12, teaches me the Chinese term for "global economic crisis."

Little Liu once anticipated the Beijing Games the way I used to Christmas Eve, but now the event feels very far away to her. "The Olympics showed foreign countries that China is a friendly and developed country," she says in English. "But now it's over." She shrugs and switches to Mandarin. "All the activities about the Olympics at school have been replaced by ones about psychological health, like 'Don't snatch purses' or 'Don't cheat people online.' And the posters with the Olympics slogan One World, One Dream were changed to ones praising our neighborhood's 800-year-old history and culture."

I cannot confirm these replacements firsthand; fears that foreigners might carry swine flu meant that I was forbidden to enter the grounds of the school where I taught for three years.

Moreover, Meyer emphasizes that the Olympics did not create the openness some international observers hoped for:

Beijing's Olympic legacy doesn't compare with that of Seoul, whose 1988 Games cajoled the then one-party government to allow direct elections and liberalization. No such defrosting is taking place in Beijing, where plainclothes police are everywhere, including outside the studio of Ai Weiwei.

3. China gets “Simified”: In the recently announced first expansion pack for the videogame The Sims 3, the latest installment in the Sims franchise originally created by designer Will Wright (also of SimCity), players will be able to take their Sims to China. The Sims allows players to control individuals or families of “Sims,” designing homes for them and guiding them through professional and personal choices (Sims can become famous in their chosen professions, have babies, age, and so on). In addition to China (specifically, “Shang Simla, China”), the expansion will also allow players to take their Sims to France and Egypt. In an interview, the game’s producer noted that the Sims won’t just be going on vacation—players will be taking their avatars adventuring, interacting with the virtual destinations:

Visiting real world locations has always been a draw for our players. There is a great push in our community to always bring more reality into the game be it through modders making celebrity hairs or recreating famous buildings on the exchange. Taking your Sims to real-world based, but Sim-inspired locations is a natural extension of that desire. Taking your Sim to a generic destination is one thing, but taking your Sims to the Great Pyramids is a big deal for us, and we're really excited about it. When players get into the game they will see that we're utilizing and building upon the innovations offered by The Sims 3 to create situations that would not have been possible before. It doesn't necessarily represent a shift in what the game is about, you'll still find that although your Sim is visiting Egypt, it's a Simified Egypt; we treasure our quirkiness. ..

The Sims 3: World Adventures isn't really about "visiting" at all; that implies you are an observer of another culture or destination. In this expansion pack, you are directly participating in the places you are travelling to, and it's very different than just being there. Your sims will start out at a kind of "base camp" and will have to earn their way up to being able to have a local home to travel to. While camp will be where your sim starts, it's all about getting out into the world and encountering what experiences are to be had. Your sim might start walking downtown to meet some locals and be asked to help find a lost artifact that will kick them off on an adventure that might lead to a secret nook of the location or into a lost tomb.

So far, we have not seen any screenshots from Shang Simla--all releases appear to be of Sim Egypt.

A Few Reading Recommendations

1. The new Journal of Current Chinese Affairs is out—and all its articles are available for free in PDF at its website. Those of possible interest to CB readers include:

“Beijing Bubble, Beijing Bust: Inequality, Trade, and Capital Inflow into China” (by James K. Galbraith, Sara Hsu, Wenjie Zhang);
“Realpolitik Dynamics and Image Construction in the Russia-China Relationship: Forging a Strategic Partnership?” (by Maria Raquel Freire, Carmen Amado Mendes);
“The Regulation of Religious Affairs in Taiwan: From State Control to Laisser-faire?” (by André Laliberté);
“Nationalism to Go - Coke Commercials between Lifestyle and Political Myth” (available only in German, by Nora Frisch);
“China’s Employment Crisis – A Stimulus for Policy Change?” (by Günter Schucher); and others.

2. The 60th anniversary assessments have started to roll out. At The Daily Beast, two commentaries stand in contrast to one another. First, Peter Osnos’s optimistic take in “Why China Eclipsed Russia” (Osnos is the Washington Post’s former Moscow correspondent):

...when it comes to comparing China today with the Soviet Union at a comparable stage, it feels safe to conclude that China is a country with a much stronger foundation for progress than its predecessor Communist behemoth. This is mainly because it has abandoned Marxist-Leninist economic principles without meaningful political reform, a trade-off its own people seem largely to accept. The simple way to summarize the difference is that the Soviet Union, for all the immense nuclear strength and apparent self-regard of its heyday, was really a facade, behind which was an economy that, at its pinnacle, was shallow and shoddy. Neither the industrial nor the agricultural system was of a size or quality to fill its needs. Most of its international trade was essentially in barter, particularly with its Eastern European satellites. Those were the early years of the computer age, but for all the engineering and scientific talent in its population, the Soviets were way behind the West in most areas, except the military—even as the United States, in particular, chose to portray the Soviet Union as being on the verge of overtaking it in crucial ways.

Russia still has a nuclear armory of immense strength and has become a formidable petrocracy. But whatever Russia’s revived superpower pretensions, there is no real doubt that China far exceeds it in economic, financial, and technical development. By sheer size, China’s military capacity and reach is enormous, though still lagging far behind that of the United States. History suggests that armed power tends to be used one way or another once it is accumulated. Yet the Chinese leaders appear for now convinced that only by steadily lifting the living standards of its people can party supremacy be assured. The Soviets said they would and could improve the lives of the citizenry, but never remotely reached their goals…

Over thousands of years, China’s history has experienced cycles and eras far longer than the six decades since 1949. My own measurement of time is even shorter. It is only twenty years since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement ended in tragedy, and forty years since the upheavals and violence of the Cultural Revolution. There are deep-seated tensions in China—the riots in Tibet last year and in Urumqi this summer being only two recent examples. Nonetheless, this is an extraordinary period of largely positive changes for China. And unlike in the Soviet Union at sixty, the Chinese leadership’s rhetorical declarations of triumph seem to be anchored in accomplishments that are measurable to the population in ways that count. As the fate of the Soviet Union dramatically showed, modern superpowers cannot be sustained by polemics and police forever.

Isabel Hilton (editor of China Dialogue), takes a more pessimistic tack:

…But mistakes not acknowledged tend to be repeated, and policies that have provoked angry responses in the past are unlikely to promote harmony in the future. The test of China’s future trajectory, of its ability to go from large power to great power, is only partly about economics. Thus far, China’s economic growth has been based on unsustainable low-end manufacturing for the export market and the legitimacy bestowed by rising living standards. To manage the next phase of development successfully, China needs to move up the value chain, improve its governance, cut down on the huge waste in the economy, distribute the rewards of the effort more fairly, and inject some justice into its politics and legal affairs. But to do that, the Communist Party has to take on the vested interests on which it depends for its power.

We all have an interest in China’s success, as President Obama underlined at the opening this week of a two-day high-level dialogue with visiting Chinese officials. With just a nod to the recent troubles in Xinjiang, Obama ticked off a list of common concerns from climate change to economic recovery. In all of them, Chinese cooperation is essential.

In a globalized world, China’s troubles are everybody’s troubles and the U.S. has little interest in seeing them grow. But China’s solutions, to date, are unlikely to help. The revolt of the minorities is only a symptom of a wider political malaise. Even taken together, their numbers, compared to the overwhelming majority of Han Chinese, are small. But the indignation and resentment that burst into view in Xinjiang in Tibet are also visible, for a wide variety of reasons, in the Han population.

3. Pico Iyer reflects on travel writing in the post-imperial age at Lapham's Quarterly in "Travel Writing: Nowhere Need Be Foreign," with a mention of Peter Hessler (he writes “if you want an American narrative of sensitivity, learning, and reflection, there are few better books (let alone better guides to contemporary China) than the deeply literate, graceful narratives of Peter Hessler”):

I call, therefore, for a travel writing that doesn’t care where it comes from and doesn’t get fussy about what it’s addressing (The Mall of America and John F. Kennedy International Airport are scenes as worthy of scrutiny as the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids of Giza ever were). A kind that, as in the best of Greene, blurs to some degree the issue of nationality in favor of something more human. Our hybrid world makes a mockery of saying that Kenyans are all savages, or that Laotians or Tibetans are all saints. The Kenyan is now an upper-class girl from Edinburgh; the Laotian is working in a hospital in Sacramento; the Tibetan is busy setting up a shop in Paris with his Breton wife. Writing about travel becomes a matter of writing about confusion and mixed identity and the snares of cultural transformation.

4. At PopMatters, a review of Ted Koppel’s 2008 Discovery Channel documentary on China (as well as of Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls). Jack Patrick Rodgers writes:

In essence, it’s a broad primer on the Chinese pre-meltdown economy and culture, designed to appeal to viewers who don’t know much about the country. The series opens with a segment on US-Chinese relations that quickly taps into the resentment of many blue-collar Americans who have watched their jobs migrate to China over the past two decades.

Take for example the company Briggs and Stratton, a maker of small motors for lawnmowers, which recently moved a manufacturing plant to the Chinese city of Chongqing and laid off almost 500 US workers in the process. At first it seems like Koppel is ready to depict this situation as an example of China stealing jobs that should rightfully belong to Americans, but the truth reveals a more complex relationship between the two countries.

Goods manufactured in China are substantially cheaper thanks to lower wages, and superstores like Wal-Mart owe their success to the rock-bottom prices that Chinese factories are able to provide. Koppel interviews Pam Leaser, a 50-year-old former employee of Briggs and Stratton, who is angry about the loss of her job but admits she does most of her shopping at Wal-Mart. When Koppel points out that her own shopping habits are the reason why China is siphoning jobs away from the America, Leaser has no response.

5. If her blog is not already on your RSS feed, this post from Xujun Eberlein (we’ve re-run several of her blog postings at CB in the past) should convince you to add it. It is a smart analysis of how the Tonghua Steel Corp. riots demonstrated that the government’s media policies continue to be ill-suited (at least in practice) to a changed media environment:

Two seemly unrelated but notable events took place in China on Friday, July 24th. In the morning, the official news agency Xinhuapublished an article titled "Ten Suggestions for Local Governments on How to Respond to Internet Opinion" on its website… [CB Edit: Eberlein directs readers to Danwei’s full translation of the article.]

As if setting up an immediate reality test for the government's new media policy, that very day a large mass incident erupted in Tonghua,Jilin. Thousands of workers of the Tonghua Steel Corp protested a private takeover of their enterprise, which had a 50-year history of state ownership. The steel factory had already suffered a failed privatization attempt from the same company. It was recovering from that and last year's financial crisis, when the renewed and expanded ownership was announced. Angry workers beat to death the new general manager appointed by the private company, Jianlong of Beijing, on his first day at work. The workers gradually dispersed only after the Jilin provincial government announced its on-the-site decision to have the private company withdraw from Tonghua Steel's business. Some Chinese netizens called the event "the first workers movement since 1949" – the year Communist rule in China began.

As a test of the new media policy, it seems to have failed. For three days, China's media kept totally silent on the shocking incident, not even the independent and daring papers such as Caijing said a word. On every commercial web portal, posts and discussions on the Tonghua riot were quickly deleted. The Western media first learned the news from a Hong Kong human rights group and reported the incident briefly on the 25th , all in a monotonous and minimalist way, quoting the same source.

Meanwhile, Chinese netizens acted quicker than the government's media controllers, and one detailed anonymous eye-witness account landed on overseas Chinese websites and was circulated around the world. It could no longer be deleted. (An English translation of this account can be found on Hong Kong-based ESWN, one of the most popular China blogs.) So far no Western media outlet has cited the far more informative account, whose content seems to be verified by various sources, including the government's own belated reporting. The speed of selection and elimination by internet surfers is amazing, and the quality control of the selection process is even more impressive.

6. At “Writers Read,” Guobin Yang gives some of his recommendations.

7. Just in case you haven’t heard, some violent video games are now verboten in the PRC.

A Reader: The 2010 Asian Games

The PR folks for the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou have added China Beat to their mailing list, so we got their note this week about organizers' plans to seed clouds to prevent rain during the Games. Our interest was piqued--we hadn't heard much yet about the 2010 Asian Games. Here are a few of the things we found when we went looking...
1. As with the Olympic preparations in Beijing, there is massive construction, investment, and environmental management (not just cloud-seeding) underway in Guangzhou, according to Xinhua:

Authorities are pumping in more than 58 billion yuan (8.5 billion U.S. dollars) to boost the transportation system and protect the environment as Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, is preparing for the 16th Asian Games next November. ...

The latest projects include a large urban metro subway network consisting of eight lines, to be completed before the opening of the sporting event. ...

On the environmental front, Yang Liu, deputy director of Guangzhou environmental protection bureau, said the city had set a goal to ensure as many as 361 days of better air quality next year.

Air quality in the city improved in the first five months of this year, with 37 fewer days of haze and dust than in the same period of last year, the newspaper said.

"But the task of ensuring better air quality during the Games remains tough," Yang said.

To fight the problem, authorities plan to raise up to 1.8 billion yuan in private funds to complement public funding toward improving air quality.

"As many as 32 highly polluting chemical plants will be removed or ordered to stop production by the end of this year," he said.

Similarly, 38 sewage treatment facilities are scheduled to be built before the Games' opening next year, with an added sewage treatment capacity of 2.25 million tonnes a day, sources with the Guangzhou water affairs bureau said.

2. The Games will sponsor a variety of cultural events along the theme of “Thrilling Games, Harmonious Asia” (激情盛会，和谐亚洲), to build excitement as the countdown to the Games begins:

At the one-year countdown, GAGOC will invite people from across Asia to meet in Guangzhou to celebrate the anniversary date for the 2010 Asian Games … and at the 100-day countdown, GAGOC will announce a new promotion “Guangzhou is ready”, while the Games’ Theme Song, Torchbearers’ Song.

Also underway is the nation-wide Asian Games Cheerleader Selection Contest, which is expected to attract more than 100,000 participants from over 300 cities. The top 30 cheerleading teams, with final approval from GAGOC, will perform in a number of venues during the Asian Games.

3. Dragon Boat Racing and Cricket will be added to the Asian Games for the first time in Guangzhou.

4. The torch relay for the Games, titled “Road of Asia," is already underway, with officials telling the Macau Daily Times that the Games are already the "best Asian Games until now":

The campaign has been on tour since its launch in Kuwait in early March and has already travelled through Pakistan, Malasya, Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines before arriving to its final destination in Guangzhou, in November in time for the one-year countdown to the 16th Asian Games.

“Road of Asia” consists of three routes and transportation means, aimed to bring toghether all Asian regions that will take part in the 2010 Asian Games. Thus, air, sea and land routes will propagate Guangzhou's Asian Games expectations, reaching out to everyone, everywhere.

According to GAGOC top officials, the 16th Asian Games are already close to completion and have already exceeded all expectations, becoming the “best Asian Games until now”.

5. We've saved the best detail for last. You may have been wondering about the little guys at the top of this post. Please meet the mascots for the 2010 Asian Games, the "five sporty goats," as one news report dubbed them (the GAGOC website calls them "sporty and cute"), Le yangyang 乐羊羊. The mascots are a play on one of Guangzhou's nicknames, "City of Goats" (羊城); you can read more background at the official website for the Games and also see there a lot more drawings of the goats being sporty (a la fuwa).

China at the World’s Fairs

Five Things to Know about China's Links to World's Fairs and International Expositions

By Susan Fernsebner

The city of Shanghai will be the official host to Expo 2010, an international event celebrating the theme “A Better City, A Better Life,” with an opening celebration next May. As the event’s website and preview videos below reveal, Expo 2010 is intended as an example of a new and shared urban modernity. Visitors will have the opportunity to tour the site personally and, if lacking an opportunity to visit Shanghai next summer, also to take a virtual tour of its grounds online.

As the videos note, Expo 2010 is intended as an event that will fulfill and expand upon the legacy of world expositions while also helping to make the “world feel at home in China.” This endeavor of global exchange amidst the scene of the exposition is one in which China has, in fact, its own lengthy history of participation. An account of important events in this lesser-known history follows...





1. Chinese objects and merchants were both on hand for what is commonly considered the first major exhibition of the modern day. In 1851, a variety of actors displayed Chinese goods at London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held at the Crystal Palace that summer. While the Qing state did not send an official contingent, at least one Chinese merchant participated alongside Western diplomats and merchants in offering displays of Chinese goods at the grand event, winning a commendation for fine silks.

2. Between 1851 and the First World War, China would participate in at least twenty-eight world’s fairs and expositions including grand events staged at London, Madrid, Paris, Philadelphia, and Vienna, among others.

3. Though originally planning to attend, the Chinese government would withhold official participation in Chicago’s “World’s Columbian Exposition” of 1893 as a protest against the exclusionary Geary Act. The passage of this act in 1892 by the United States Congress renewed restrictions on Chinese immigration and imposed a strict regulation system for Chinese laborers residing in the U.S.

4. In 1904, Prince Pu Lun of the Qing imperial clan would personally attend the St. Louis Exposition and host a grand reception for over three thousand guests at one of the city’s fine hotels that spring. His visit also would be preceded by the reformist critic (and temporary expatriate) Liang Qichao, who toured the exposition grounds during the course of their construction the previous year (this was not the first time Liang Qichao spent time thinking about Expos, as in 1902 he wrote a story that imagined a Chinese international exhibition taking place in Shanghai in the far-off future date of 1962...).

5. China staged its first national fair, the 1910 Nanyang Exposition in the city of Nanjing under the co-sponsorship of the Qing state and independent investors. Intended as an event that would further industrial development and “enlighten the people,” the exposition offered discounted tickets for students and soldiers and included presentations by Japan, the United States, England, and Germany, among other nations. The exposition grounds would also offer multiple theaters, musical arenas, shops, restaurants, and a grand display of over fourteen thousand electric lights. As organizers noted, China had, like other nations around the world, reached a day in which both an education in material things and popular amusement itself was indeed “a certain necessity.”

Susan Fernsebner, an associate professor of history at the University of Mary Washington, is currently completing a book-length study on the history of China’s participation in world’s fairs and expositions.

Reading Round-Up

To start, a few pieces not related to the events in Xinjiang:

1. “Edge of the American West,” a history/philosophy academic group blog, ran a piece today by David Silbey titled, “Death Preparatory to Resurrection [Boxers, July 13-16, 1900]” that reflects on Western media coverage during that time of the supposed massacre of foreigners in Beijing (later proven to be false):

This was the week that the westerners besieged in the embassies in Beijing died. They would be reborn again quite quickly, but for several days in the middle of July the world was firmly convinced that they had all been slaughtered. According to the New York Times of July 13th, working off a report by the Daily Mail of London, the Chinese Army had mounted a final assault on the legations in Beijing on July 6th, backed by heavy artillery…

Also in the historical news this week: “Nixon Announces Visit to Communist China”—that’d be July 15, 1971 (ht Ray Kwong via Aimee Barnes). (Last year, we reviewed Margaret MacMillan's recent book, Nixon and Mao, which details the visit the following year, and the negotiations that led up to it.)

2. Also from Aimee Barnes, her blog features a fascinating interview with Joel B. Eisen, a professor from Richmond School of Law who was a Fulbright lecturer in China in 2008-09:

Preparing for classes in China was much more difficult than at home…They knew little about our legal system, so I was often starting from scratch there. In Energy Law I spent several weeks explaining the basics of American law, and administrative law in particular. Learning how administrative agencies work can be frustrating and difficult for American law students, let alone those with a rudimentary knowledge of our legal system, so that was a challenge. In International Environmental Law, I spent much time discussing bedrock principles of international law before moving on to talk about global warming…

In the International Environmental Law course, I conducted an exercise over the course of the semester with teams of students representing individual nations seeking to reach an international climate agreement. Many aspects of this – role-playing, advocating for nations other than their own, and direct in-class negotiations – were obviously new territory for the students, but they rose to the occasion. They were often zealous advocates for the nations they represented, even if it sometimes meant taking positions appearing to contradict their own beliefs. One day, students representing the United States took those representing China to task, criticizing the government’s position that China is a “developing nation” that need not agree to carbon caps.

I was quite surprised by the autonomy I had in Chinese classrooms. No one attempted to exert influence over me, although each class had a “monitor” and I had to be somewhat politically sensitive. However, I was never reproached, even when I had less than flattering words for Chinese environmental policies.

3. Now, on to a few pieces on Xinjiang worth taking a look at. In case you missed it last week, The New York Times ran one of its “room for debates” on the situation for Chinese Uighurs. The series includes commentaries from four contributors, including City University of New York Professor Yan Sun:

Without any need to repeat government accounts to me, my relatives mostly see “outside forces” as the main reason for the latest as well as other riots in Xinjiang in recent years. Citing long-term good friendship with local Muslims, they are hard-pressed to think of divisions serious enough to cause deadly riots. Rather, they claim to have seen outside influences at work from their own experience, e.g., money for underground mosques where mullahs engage in inciting rhetoric, for “terrorist groups” that make explosives and bombs, or for restless Muslim youths who stage trouble on the streets.

4. At Yale Global Online, Dru Gladney writes about the use of media to make the Uighur debates global conversations:

Given the ubiquity of the new media, it will be impossible to quarantine the ethnic pandemic spreading across China and indeed the world. News and popular expression have continued to Twitter out of China despite the government’s efforts to halt its spread. A remedy needs to be found not in shutting down these new media, but in addressing the complaints and general well-being of its populace.

5. At openDemocracy, Kerry Brown writes that China watchers have been underestimating Xinjiang’s powderkeg properties:

By 2009, Xinjiang looks like a place with a delicate ecosystem placed under impossible pressure. Just as much of its natural resources now are being exhaustively exploited, so the area has an impossible mixture of Han, Uyghur, and over a dozen other minorities, including a large number of Mongolians in the central region. It is now a territory with a population almost evenly divided between settlers and local groups that are themselves ethnically, religiously, and culturally different. Tensions have evidently been building. What happened on 5-6 July 2009 could be a mere precursor to much, much worse.

Reading Round-Up

Little bits and pieces from around the web…

1. In case you missed it, David Brooks wrote a column about China in The New York Times last week. In it, he details two perspectives on China’s future presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival. On the one hand,

The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica…

During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. and for about half of global growth. But a marriage in which one partner does all the saving and the other partner does all the spending is not going to last.

The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States…

Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships.

On the other hand,

James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little.

Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible.

Make the jump to read the full column.

2. China Beat contributor Guobin Yang has a new book out: The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, published by Columbia University Press. Last week, Yang published an accompanying commentary on Green Dam at the publisher’s website:

The incident demonstrates yet again the power of the Internet in China. Both Chinese bloggers and Western media have hailed this new brand of online activism. I myself have commented on this display of Web power here. With the “Green Dam” controversy quieting down for now, it is helpful to step back and reflect a bit on some more enduring issues about Internet control and online activism in China.

The Green Dam policy indicates that there is still a surprising degree of bluntness in the exercise of state control over the Internet. In recent years, the Chinese government has demonstrated new levels of sophistication in affairs of Internet governance. One sign is the adoption since 2004 of a soft-management approach, which emphasizes self-discipline, civic responsibility, and the use of legal rather than administrative power to contain harmful contents. Part of the reason why the Green Dam policy met with such strong resistance is that it represented an unbearably heavy-handed approach to Internet control.

The case further reveals an ambivalent and complex relationship between government and Internet businesses. It shows that private businesses can be recruited for the control of the Internet. Indeed, many Chinese netizens see the Green Dam more as a sweet business deal for the software company than an effective control measure. This kind of outsourcing and privatization of control had long caused concern, and the Green Dam controversy brought the issue back into the public limelight, raised concerns about future state-market collusion.

The Green Dam case, however, is much more revealing about online activism than about Internet control. It shows that control almost always encounters opposition, and such opposition—a new form of online activism—can be powerful enough to seriously undermine control efforts.

Read more here.

3. China Heritage Quarterly’s June issue is now available, with a batch of rich reflections on the notion of “commemoration,” including a piece by historian Vera Schwarcz that puts her experiences on May 4, 2009 into historical context:

I reflected on this pairing of commemorations during my bicycle tours of Beida; I also noticed something new: a huge number of birds had returned to the campus in the past two years. Most noticeable were the magpies: large, lustrous flyers with black and blue tail feathers that crisscrossed the paths leading down to No Name Lake (Weiming Hu 未名湖). A poet-scholar friend from the Social Science Academy, Fu Hao 傅浩, came to visit me and remarked that these xi que'r 喜鹊儿 were bearers of good news for the Chinese landscape: ‘In preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese tried to repair their relationship with nature. In return, nature has been kind and responded with generous renewal.' Signs of this renewal were amply evident all over Beijing: It was not just the birds that had come back to fly freely, minds too were roaming less hindered, especially those out of the glare of publicity.

I savored this freedom on 3 May, during the first day of the formal, academic conference on the ninetieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement hosted by the Modern History Institute of the Social Science Academy. In the newly refurbished seminar room of their compound located in the north of the Wangfujing 王府井 area, seventy five scholars from different institutions in China and three foreign countries gathered to discuss new research on the events of 1919. Scholars from abroad were far fewer than they had been during the seventieth anniversary conference in 1989, which had brought to Beijing Chow Tse-tsung and others from the US as well as people from Europe, Southeast Asia and Japan.

Now, twenty years later, a couple of researchers from Korea, a few from Japan and two from the US were the only representatives from abroad. The limited numbers may simply reflect the ‘normalization' of May Fourth research over the past decades. Whereas in 1979 the national conference of the May Fourth Movement's sixtieth anniversary had been overshadowed by political condemnations of key intellectual figures such as Hu Shi 胡适, Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 and Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (because they had not followed the path of communist revolution), thirty years later the Social Science Academy conference had more that two dozen presentations on these formerly controversial figures.

Now it was possible to also have research presentations on the May Fourth origins of Wang Jingwei 汪精卫 (once damned simply as a ‘traitor' for this role during the Japanese occupation) as well as extended discussion of a paper on ‘the tragedy of modern Chinese intellectuals'. Broken up into three simultaneous sessions, each lasting an hour and a half, this conference was professionally organized and academically challenging. New explorations of archival sources enabled younger scholars to re-think earlier assumptions about the role of students in labor organizing not just in Beijing, but in Shanghai and Wuhan as well. Broad generalization about the ‘Chinese enlightenment' were challenged and redefined in light of careful historiographical reflection on European history, and this lead to new questions about the role of critical thought in challenging the abiding authority of religion and politics in French as well as in modern Chinese history.

Visit here for access to features, articles, and more in the most recent issue.

4. During April, May, and June, we ran several excerpts from Philip J. Cunningham’s new book, Tiananmen Moon. The Bangkok Post recently ran a review of the book:

Like Cunningham himself, the reader begins as an outsider to the movement and gets drawn further and further in, first out of curiosity and then a sense of solidarity. The author - friends with students and other liberal Chinese, and fluent in Chinese - gets as far inside perhaps as a Western eye can get. His account, accessible and readable, is a foreign perspective - perhaps being partially outside the frame helps to see the greater picture at times, to ask the right questions - but one with an insider's fondness for and grasp of China's idiosyncrasies.

Cunningham is sympathetic to the cause - he joins the march, he throws a rock at an armoured personnel carrier - but at times highly critical of some aspects of the movement, from hyperbolic talk of bloodshed to hypocritical corruption in the ranks of Tiananmen Square power. There is cash support from groups in Hong Kong and some tacit support from Western embassies and CCP officials. Who is protesting whom? The lines get thinner and blurrier. Who is in charge, and by whose authority; is it a genuine spontaneous hierarchy created by necessity, or perhaps by coercion or design? So much depends on this movement, it seems, but who is playing whom? A busload of military weapons shows up - is it a Trojan Horse of sorts, pretence for a violent crackdown, "evidence" that the students have changed their non-violent stance and deserve purging?

5. Those who are not familiar with the publication Renditions may want to check it out. Based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the publication presents a variety of translations of Chinese sources into English, centered around a different theme in each issue (the most recent issue examines Chinese film). Though the majority of the material is only available in hard copy, one or two translations from each issue is available online (and can be found at the link above).

Looking Backwards: From 1989 to Han Times and from 2008 to 1964

There have been many efforts during the last month, on this site and elsewhere, to bring history into discussions of the twentieth anniversary of June 4th (particularly via allusions the May 4th Movement of 1919), just as a year ago there were many efforts to bring history into discussions of the Beijing Games (especially via allusions to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Seoul Olympics of 1988). But there's still room for this Top Five list of historically minded pieces on 1989 or 2008 that have just appeared and stand out as especially worth checking out, due to either how deeply they delve into parallels with earlier times or the novelty of their strategies for bringing together past and present.

1) On June 1, Alan Baumler of the estimable Frog-In-A-Well blog, which has separate sections devoted to the histories of different East Asian countries, offered up a very thoughtful look at a precedent for the 1989 student-led protests that pre-dated (by many centuries) the founding of the first modern Chinese university in 1898.

Here's a snippet that we hope will encourage you to make the jump to read all of his "Student Protests in Han China":

"Like most university students, [those of Later Han times, circa 160] were in an anomalous position in society. Imperial University students were members of the elite, but not elite enough to get government jobs just based on their family. Like later students they were also frustrated by their prospects. By the Later Han the curriculum at the University was considered hopelessly out of date and attending was no longer a reliable route to office. Students were deeply concerned with the problems of the state, which is not surprising, and they were particularly concerned with the problem of corruption and favoritism in official appointments, which is also not surprising, given that they were the ones most likely to be passed over if jobs were not given on merit. During this period the student’s enemies were not the Communist Party, but the eunuchs and their faction, who were rivals of the great aristocratic families."

2) On June 2, Duncan Hewitt, the Shanghai-based author of China: Getting Rich First: A Modern Social History, weighed in on the meaning of the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen protests on a Newsweek blog. He has many things of interest to say in this piece, which is well worth reading in its entirety, but one notable point is that the it is not just the details about 1989 but also those about the Democracy Wall Movement that preceded it by roughly a decade that have been fading.

3) On June 5, Evan Osnos ran an insightful piece on his "Letter from China" blog called "The Other Tiananmen Moment," which stressed the importance of thinking about the complex ties between the events of the mid-to-late 1960s and the late 1980s in the minds of some Chinese. (And for more about the Cultural Revolution-era photographs he discusses and shows, see this guest post by Jean Loh we ran in April.)

4) Regular readers of this site have seen many pieces by frequent contributor Susan Brownell exploring different aspects of the Beijing Games, including its parallels to and differences from past Olympics. (And material from those posts is also showcased in China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.) But there's still much new to be learned from her latest publication on the topic, which she has just done for the excellent and wide-ranging Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. She offers her most detailed and sophisticated look to date at the connections between the Beijing Olympics and both of the previous Asian Summer Games, those that took place in Tokyo in 1964 and Seoul in 1988.

5) The same online journal has two other good pieces about Asia and the Olympics. The one with the most historical bent is a fascinating essay on the Tokyo Games by Christian Tagsold, which though focusing on Japan should be of interest to many people more concerned with China. Called "The 1964 Tokyo Olympics as Political Games," it argues, as its title indicates, that the tendency to treat the Japanese Games as more "apolitical" than the Korean and Chinese ones that followed is misleading. (Those in a mood for looking forward rather than backward should be sure to check out as well William W. Kelly's smart companion piece on the prospects for the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, another essay that concentrates on Japan but has relevance for other parts of East Asia as well.)

Reading Roundup

1. A very cool set of reports from 1949 on what happened in Shanghai sixty years ago when the Communist Party took control (Hat tip: Shanghaiist).

2. Alec Ash continues with brief insights on critical issues. Here’s a nugget on the Chinese “brain drain.”

3. A very smart review of Zhao's memoir by Richard Rigby at East Asia Forum:

What was not generally known at the time to outside observers was Zhao’s determination, mentioned several times in the book, that he not go down in history as the General Secretary who approved unleashing the PLA against the demonstrators.

In so doing he sealed his political fate, but also ensured his name would be added to the (all too long) list of upright officials who throughout Chinese history did the right thing – to their cost, but to their own, and China’s, ultimate credit.

The fascination of the book, though, goes much further than Zhao’s account of the June 4 events.

It will be mined in great detail by many for the insights it provides into the evolution of the economic reform program, the twists and turns of internal party struggles, the paramount role of Deng Xiaoping (but even his power was not unlimited), the serious differences within the reform camp over political reform (and in Zhao’s case, the way his thinking on this issue changed, and continued to do following his removal from power), Zhao’s insightful pen-portraits of his erstwhile colleagues, and his frank admissions of various policy mistakes (in particular the mishandling of the price reform of 1988).

Most of all, the book stands out as the sole account of how things worked – and in some, but not all ways, presumably still do – at the very top of the Chinese political system, by one who was there.

(Go to East Asia Forum for more.)

4. Check out an intriguing new blog (hat tip: Victor Mair) called The China Society Pages that features translations of quirky Chinese new stories (some of which also appear at CNReviews), including recent entries like “Husband and Wife Sue His Former Mistress,” “Widowed Chicken Disconsolate over Loss of Rooster,” and “Man Stabs Father 6 Times Killing Him, Then Goes Back to Bed.” You get the idea.

5. China is trying to manage its international profile the same way it does at home: by creating media, this time aimed at foreigners. Hear the story at NPR.

A Few Readings around the Web

1. China Digital Times is on our RSS feed, and, hopefully, on yours too—it is one of the essential places where English-language readers can find easily accessible updates of what is happening in China and in the Chinese media and blogosphere. CNReviews has posted an interview with CDT’s Sophie Beach that gives further details about the site’s management and goals.

2. In the interview, Beach also mentions her own website (好妈妈) on raising bilingual children, chockfull of information and references for those who are interested. At Hao Mama, Beach references Anna Greenspan’s website, Waking Giants, on Greenspan’s experiences sending her son to local school in Shanghai. We linked to Waking Giants when it first launched (Greenspan contributed a piece on the melamine scandal to the China Beat-based book, China in 2008), but the blog has grown since then, including interesting posts on the growing cult for the 2010 Expo mascot, Haibao.

3. For a one-stop shop of interesting pieces on China, check out this page at The Guardian for a week-long feature called “China at the Crossroads” (十字路口的中国). The Guardian has also launched a Chinese version, featuring a selection of its articles. For more about this service (done by volunteer translators at Yeeyan), see here.

4. The USC’s US-China Institute hosts US-China Today, a website we’ve been checking in with regularly for its quality content on a variety of China-related subjects. As examples, check out features stories “From Gold Farmers to Kings: Online Gaming in China” by Steven Jefferson and Peter Winter or “Missionaries of Sound” on Chinese hip-hop by Jonathan Hwang (full disclosure: Hwang is a UCI undergrad and studies with China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom). Many of the contributors to US-China Today are undergraduates and graduate students.

5. There have been a number of memorials in the past week for the victims of last year’s earthquake. Given that a year ago, China Beat ran excerpts of letters from Peter Hessler’s former students, many of whom are now teachers themselves, we found this piece at Alec Ash’s blog (Six), particularly interesting. Written by a guest poster, Ash’s friend Katrina Hamlin, the post reflects on how Hamlin’s students in Chengdu have been processing the disaster.

Zhao's Memoirs: 5 Places to Turn

The biggest publishing news just now related to Tiananmen's 20th anniversary is the release of Zhao Ziyang's memoirs, a book that was apparently already being offered for sale in Hong Kong even before its official publication date and has been reviewed, excerpted, and discussed in various newspapers and magazines.  We may at some point do an "In Case You Missed It" review of Prisoner of the State (or deal with it extensively in another fashion), but we weren't able to do a "Coming Distractions" piece about it for a simple reason: we weren't sent an advance copy.* 

What we can do at this point is offer up a top 5 list, which directs readers to some of the most interesting things that others have been saying about the book, based either on reading it or in some cases simply ruminating on its appearance and how reports related to it have been making their way into or been kept out of China. Here are five things worth reading:

1. This blog post by Evan Osnos reflecting on the fact that this isn't the first time that efforts by the Chinese authorities to keep someone silent have failed, even if in the case of this book it is appearing posthumously.

2. This smart piece by Geoff Dyer and Jamil Anderlini of the Financial Times that sums up many key points about Zhao and the book and includes some telling quotes.

3. Peking Duck on the ability, at least for a time, for Internet users in the PRC to access excerpts from the book in audio form, with an allusion to the role of tweets in spreading word of this possibility. Or go to Jeremy Goldkorn's post on this same phenomenon as evidence that "China's Net Nanny moves in mysterious ways," a good line.

4. Speaking of turns of phrase, Perry Link's Washington Post review of Zhao's memoir ends with a striking one. In trying to capture the complexities of a situation in which there is often great discontent and yet the government stays in power, he writes that: "The seal continues to straddle the ball -- insecure as ever, but still definitely on top." (This sort of zoological analogy for a political situation may remind regular readers of Link's best known New York Review of Books commentaries, which was about the complex workings of censorship and self-censorship and was called "China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier.")

5. China Digital Times with a typically good set of excerpts from reviews and other coverage.

* Note to any publishers, authors, or agents who follow this blog: feel free to send advance copies of works that might interest our readers to China Beat c/o History Department, 200 Krieger Hall, University of California-Irvine, as they might end up the focus of a "Coming Distractions" post.

One Year Ago

A year ago, we were glued to our televisions and computers, like so many others in China and around the world, watching a tragedy unfold in Sichuan. The news we saw from the earthquake zone was bleak and heartbreaking.

Several news sites have run memorials, one-year on, and we’ve selected a few of those in the reader below. We also point you to some of the coverage we ran at China Beat in the days that followed.

1.One of the things Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley stressed in a piece for China Beat last May was that Chinese volunteerism was not a brand-new phenomenon, instead linking to a strain in the late Qing. The volunteer spirit that has emerged in response to the earthquake, however, has continued to draw attention, as in this piece at the Christian Science Monitor.

2.China has officially expressed its “gratitude” for international aid, a situation many were tracking a year ago.

3. Richard Kraus noted the historical resonances of the efforts to preserve “Grandpa” Wen’s calligraphy in Sichuan. Wen Jiabao’s written words have continued to be a source of interest, as shown by this piece about Wen sending handwritten notes to earthquake survivors.

4.The Chinese Red Cross has continued to be an important source of aid to survivors, as discussed in this piece from the Telegraph. In a two-part piece last year, Caroline Reeves wrote about the history of the Chinese Red Cross (part 1, part 2).

5.Some of you may remember that NPR reporters Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were coincidentally in Sichuan when the earthquake struck. NPR has been providing in-depth one-year coverage of the earthquake, including this piece on the sensitive topic of children who died in their classrooms. In a piece last spring, Peter Hessler relayed correspondence with his former students—about whom he wrote in River Town—immediately after the earthquake, many discussing the events at their local schools.

We ran a few other pieces at CB one year ago that readers may continue to find interesting (if you didn’t read them the first time around): Susan Brownell’s consideration of the Tangshan earthquake and the Montreal Olympics, Steve Smith’s investigation of the role rumor played in the Sichuan earthquake, and Don Sutton’s piece on the mourning rituals after the earthquake.