Filthy Fiction: The Writings of Zhu Wen

By Julia Lovell

Chinese fiction of the 1990s was not short on shock value. If we think of the decade’s cultural tone being set by Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 command to unleash commercial forces, then the years that followed proved rich in works that would have done the old man proud. Quick off the mark was Jia Pingwa, who triumphantly became one of the earliest, most notorious cases of a serious writer surrendering to lurid populism, with his 1993 novel, The Ruined Capital (Feidu): a best-selling, soft-pornographic tale of a male writer’s travails through the corruption of contemporary China. Things were not looking much more restrained by 1999, when Weihui, in Shanghai Baby (Shanghai baobei), had her young heroine Coco jettison her dreamy Chinese artist boyfriend for a torrid affair (featuring a hard-to-forget toilet sex scene) with a German accountant called Mark.

Just halfway between these two literary moments came the quiet publication of something genuinely outrageous. In 1996, a 28-year-old thermal engineer-turned-avant-garde novelist called Zhu Wen produced a novella, around 150 pages long, entitled Didi de yanzou. Translating the title alone makes me blush, though I will do my best to gloss its subtleties. An unimaginatively literal rendering would make it “My Little Brother’s Performance”, but in Chinese “little brother” (didi) happens also to be one of the language’s many slang usages for penis. If I were then to add that it’s set in a university (in east-coast Nanjing) and features a cast of late adolescent, sex-starved male undergraduates, you might reasonably infer that the story is a Chinese first-cousin to the Western teen-sex comedy -- American Pie and its many sequels and spin-offs. It certainly enjoys a good share of the genre’s gross-out crassness.

Here’s a basic summary. The novella starts as it means to go on, with its unnamed narrator meandering through campus in an ill-fitting suit that he has mortgaged off a random fellow-undergraduate with his penultimate condom, looking for girls in short shorts and aimlessly shouting “copulate!” outside classrooms full of diligent students. Our narrator’s roommates are a similarly disreputable lot. There’s Zhou Jian, whose first contribution to the group is to offer them the sexual services of his older cousin (without mentioning this to her in advance). “She must have been frigid,” reasons the narrator, after she has refused every one of them.[1] In one uplifting scene, they take her out for a graduation dinner in the anticipation of getting her so drunk they can all, one by one, have their way with her. (Unfortunately for the hopefuls, they fail to regulate their own intake, and wind up biliously under the table, while she remains decorously compos.) Then again, there’s the spineless Haimen, as desperate to join the Communist Party as he is to ingratiate himself with his degenerate classmates; or the subnormal Lao Wu, who gets put away for attempted rape in the middle of his academic career. The best of the bunch is probably the narcoleptic Jian Xin, whose sole, lofty ambition is to sleep his way through university.

At one point, the group decides to widen their search for women by riding the local train-routes around Nanjing, on which expeditions the narrator’s job is to treat any female they meet to a complementary Freudian analysis, invariably diagnosing sexual repression curable only by promiscuous sex. And so on they go: groping each other’s girlfriends and occasionally impregnating their own; struggling to make a buck out of human waste products on the nascent free market economy; picking fights with local nouveaux riches; eyeing up nightclub prostitutes, etcetera, etcetera – all the way up to graduation in 1990.

Didi de yanzou, in short, makes the short story that in 1994 first dragged Zhu Wen into China’s literary spotlight – I Love Dollars (Wo ai meiyuan), a tale of a father and son searching for sex in a provincial Chinese city – look like Jane Austen. Reading it today, it seems extraordinary that it should ever have been allowed to emerge into the “spiritual socialist civilisation” that the Communist authorities supposedly began building in 1996. (Its publication, in the way of many of contemporary Chinese literature’s more unpredictable events, was probably as much accidental as anything else. Zhu Wen claims that the editor who saw it into print did so only “because he owed me money.” [2])

So far, so filthy. But I wonder if there’s something a touch more interesting, and less provocatively sensationalist about the novella than the summary I’ve just given might suggest. The novella is rescued, first of all, by Zhu Wen’s even-handed toughness on his protagonists. The spermatic journey is a pretty widespread feature of post-Mao Chinese fiction written by men, but authors usually spare their sex-questing males at least a glimmer of sympathy: the locus classicus here would be Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s all-conquering narrators in Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible, but works by Jia Pingwa, Mo Yan and Yan Lianke could also serve to illustrate.

Zhu Wen, by contrast, is serious about his characters’ offensiveness – at no point does he permit a whisper of boys’-own approval to prettify his reprobate anti-heroes. Across his ten-year writing career (he abandoned fiction in 1999 for film-making), Zhu Wen made plain-speaking his speciality. Moving across the bleaker, seedier landscapes of contemporary China (sinking state-owned factories, callous hospitals, cheerless Yangtze passenger boats), his stories take a long, hard stare at the pettiness, greed and indifference of Chinese society. And in Didi de yanzou, as elsewhere, Zhu Wen is determined not to let anyone escape his pages with any kind of dignity. In the course of the story, his protagonists’ every deficiency – physical and mental – is hung out to dry: their aimlessness, their uncouthness, their sexual opportunism, their haemorrhoids. Our narrator ends the story the sex-toy of his married, late-thirties boss, the deputy installations manager in the dead-end power plant that the socialist state transfers him to after graduation – a fairly poor kind of advertisement for the life he leads.

Zhu Wen’s harshness has a clear, critical purpose (to shatter the saccharine pieties of socialist realism) that goes beyond a superficial desire to shock. “I deliberately made my characters a bunch of clowns,” Zhu Wen (who was himself at university through the same years) has explained. “That’s how we felt, back then – powerless, ridiculous. And that’s all down to history, of course. Our background was empty – because of the destruction of traditional culture that had been going on since May Fourth, and through the Cultural Revolution.”

It’s this same talent for straight-talking that saves the novella from oppressing the reader with obnoxiousness. The swaggering machismo of the plot is undercut by a relaxed, colloquial narrative voice (another Zhu Wen trademark), that lets the base delusions of the characters speak for themselves, without requiring any omniscient moralising commentary [3]. In their penultimate year, the friends get caught up in the poetry-writing pandemic of late 1980s China, turning out their own samizdat journal – modestly entitled The Highway to Heaven. Naturally, the entire venture is just another game-plan for sniffing out attractive females (to whom distribution is free). “We’d made 200 copies, of which 100 were now in the public domain,” the narrator calculates. “Before it ended up being used as toilet paper, each issue would have gone through at least ten readers; each reader would have told at least ten more people about it before consigning all memory of it to oblivion. That meant we had at least 10,000 readers…Bearing in mind the national male-female ratio of 5.6:4.4, in theory 4,400 of these were female. And if you failed to find that exciting, you clearly had a problem.” (93-94) The poets then retreat to their dormitory, staying up all night anticipating the arrival of thousands of beddable female admirers – who of course never materialise. Our aspiring literati receive one lone anonymous female fan letter (which they all suspect each other of having forged); when they try to hold a poetry discussion meeting in their room, only male students turn up, hoping (likewise) to meet some girls.

Zhu Wen also has a surprisingly serious message to communicate about a very specific moment in the recent Chinese past: almost a fifth of the novella is taken up in describing the student demonstrations of the 1980s. It is, it should be remembered, a very unusual thing for literary works published in mainland China to refer so directly (or indeed at all) to the late-decade spiral of protests. The subject has so far been largely monopolised by writers publishing abroad, beyond the reach of the Communist establishment: by Gao Xingjian, Ma Jian and Ha Jin, for example. Despite its pretensions to create an epic of China’s last four decades, Yu Hua’s Brothers (Xiongdi) seems to lack as much as a veiled allusion. Zhu Wen, of course, does not write directly about the marches of spring 1989 – even the napping censors of 1996 would probably have woken up to that. Instead, he focuses on the anti-African riots that began in Nanjing on Christmas Day 1988. But his purpose remains to try to express something about the mess of motivations that brought the students out onto the streets. “I wanted to write about 4 June, about the atmosphere surrounding the demonstrations, but I couldn’t,” he has admitted. “That’s why I ended up writing about the African protests.” (It is, incidentally, unusual for Zhu Wen to write about anything so historically precise: ordinarily, he seems happier rooting his stories at non-specific times and places through the 1990s, searching after a general zeitgeist without pinning himself down to political particulars.)

And true to his provocative colours, Zhu Wen assembles a picture of the turmoil that demolishes not only the Communist Party’s dream of a “spiritual socialist civilisation”, but also many of the West’s cherished perceptions of some of these events. As the Western media swivelled its cameras onto the demonstrations of spring 1989, China’s rebellious students made highly effective use of the attention, filling international news coverage with pictures of hunger-striking martyrs, the white headbands over their pale foreheads demanding “democracy or death”. And those images, not surprisingly, hold a powerful monopoly on our memories of this time – at least partly, in the interests of providing a back-story worthy of the demonstrations’ tragically horrific finale. Zhu Wen’s protestors, by contrast, are a very different crew: a gang of late adolescent chancers, searching only for an excuse (any excuse) to “let off steam” – gifted to them in the novella by an eruption of racial hatred.

On Christmas Day 1988, we’re told, a wealthy Zairean student in Nanjing invites some female Chinese students to his room on campus. After an elderly caretaker kicks up a fuss, a fight results, leaving the old man badly injured – on the point of death, reports the rumour mill. The student community is instantly incensed: although the narrator and his friends aren’t slow to join the action, they’re too late to enjoy an initial riot in the foreign students’ building. “There was nothing left for us to do,” he sighs. “Everything had been smashed: all the windows, and the bikes parked outside; even some of the doors to the rooms.” (60) Next, one of the narrator’s wastrel roommates, Niu Yue (whose star turn this far has been to eat his own faeces– as a gratuitous publicity stunt – while claiming it’s an outcry against poor quality cafeteria food) reinvents himself as protest leader, exhorting his fellow students to take to the streets, to fill campus with angry banners: “‘Punish the murderers, give our people back their national dignity’ – that kind of thing….We were used to seeing Chinese people done over by Westerners,” muses the narrator. “Our prettiest female comrades would faint the moment they saw a white man. Or a dollar…Some of them would consider it a tremendous honour to be screwed by such individuals, hoping that after the deed was done, they’d get taken back to America to be screwed again…All this, we were well used to – we were adjusted. But now blacks were trying the same trick – this was too much. That’s why the locals were lining the streets, clapping and cheering us on. What reason did we have for giving up? Even if we had all long wearied of a movement that was growing vaguer, more directionless by the day.” (65-68)

Behind the high-flown rhetoric, though, the students seem interested only in the pleasures of anarchy: “Now we all had sticks, we could do whatever we liked, it seemed. There was no stopping us.” (61) At every opportunity, Zhu Wen robs the protests of any suspicion of political idealism: “Why not?” thinks the narrator, when asked to confront the college’s Students’ Association about their failure to get involved. “It’ll give me an appetite for lunch.” (64) Others join in just for a break from routine. Within a day or two, a strike is called – classes and exams are cancelled, and students sleep happily through the cacophonous dawn broadcasts summoning them to freezing, open-air physical jerks. Jian Xin uses the disruption to “set a new personal best: three days without even getting out of bed. Though no-one doubted his proud sense of national dignity, of course.” (68) The narrator throws himself into the marches to distract himself from breaking up with his girlfriend – and in the hope of bumping into her somewhere around the city – while another of his roommates secures himself a girlfriend from among the random females he rubs up against while out on the streets.

Zhu Wen’s determination to deny the demonstrations even a whiff of heroism holds to their climax: a mass student march on the train station, where the African students may – or may not – be waiting to get on a train to Beijing, and a stand-off with riot police. “Now he was painfully aware of Being Someone,” the narrator snipes, “Niu Yue held himself with a special kind of stiff dignity – as if permanently at the ready to strike a pose for the cover of Time Magazine.” (73) Later on in the march, Zhu Wen heartlessly has Niu Yue’s envoy to the riot police wet himself with fear, sending him back and forth between the two negotiating groups “his trousers dripping with urine”. But Zhu Wen can also reach beyond cheap mockery to evoke crowd dynamics with a claustrophobic surrealism faintly reminiscent of Lu Xun’s mob horror. “My eyes – fixed ahead – were burning, my head a screaming blank,” recalls our narrator, waiting for the final march to begin.

As dusk fell, the sodium street lamps slowly brightened. The assembled crowd kept looking up at the lights, buzzing through the twilight, then back down again – waiting. All these faces, I suddenly felt, were floating, spinning before me, in and out of shadow – I seemed to know them, then not at all. I no longer knew what I was seeing. All I wanted was to breathe in and out, in great, thirsty exhalations, as if I were gasping for life itself. At this moment of standstill, an invisible hand suddenly seized my heart, fast. I wanted to cry out: and perhaps my mouth was open to do so, but no sound was emerging. I fell out of line, desperate to get out of the group, to draw breath. Then the whistle sounded, and our untidy column began to straggle down the street…When we got to Zhonglou Square, I got cramp in my calf. I fell out of line again, trying to kick the pain out against the tarmac. No joy; I tried again. I knew that I had now become an object of considerable interest to my fellow marchers: Look at him, they were saying to each other, kicking the tarmac….But my performance had to go on, because the cramp was getting worse. The column moved round the square, and on towards the train station. I’d now been at it so long that I was starting to feel foolish, embarrassed, but still I had to continue…The longer I spent doing it, the worse my mood, and the pain got. At last, someone came over – a broad, well-built type – and told me to sit down. I was more than happy to obey. My only hope at that moment was that someone should stand up and tell me exactly what to do. So I sat down, both hands flat on the ground. I looked up at him, as he towered opposite me. What was he going to do for me? Why wasn’t he getting on with it? At this juncture, an anxious voice called out to him, and without another word he turned and melted back into the crowd. I never saw him again. So there I was: alone, on the tarmac, looking about me…I waved at one of my spectators. He nervously approached, stopping at a safe distance. Do me a favour, I said. Kick me. Whether he heard me or not, I’ll never know; he just stared then ran off. (73-76)

The whole thing ends as anti-heroically as it begins. The stand-off with the police peters out; the authorities gift the students a slap-up New Year’s feed; the students happily guzzle it down. (“‘Fuck,’ complained Niu Yue. ‘These bastards have all dipped their sense of national dignity in vinegar and swallowed it.’ Though his keen sense of betrayal didn’t seem to be affecting his own appetite.”) Niu Yue – the true leader – escapes unscathed and sets about pursuing one of the girls romantically linked to the African students, while the luckless chairman of the student association (hectored by Niu Yue into taking part) takes the full wrath of the establishment. The roommates drift into their final year. (79)

Zhu Wen’s apparent dedication to puncturing established, noble images of the late 1980s has succeeded in enraging literary veterans of the political and cultural turbulence that reached such an awful climax in early June 1989. At a festival in London in May 2008, he was asked about his views on the events of 1989. He was in bed, asleep, he responded. Ten days later, a member of the audience, the dissident author Ma Jian – whose own epic novel of the demonstrations, Beijing Coma, has won him much literary acclaim in the West over the past year – published an article in the London Times that spat with indignation. Zhu Wen, he fumed, was “a savvy young Chinese writer…with a self-satisfied smirk…There is a word in Chinese that describes this attitude: xiaosa. It means imperturbable, detached, nonchalant. This carefree denial of the meaningful role of an artist in society is a blight that inflicts great numbers of China’s unofficial cultural elite.”[4] It’s easy to see how Zhu Wen’s public manner – full of a bantering self-confidence that could be read as complacent swagger – might provoke. At a recent talk in Britain, he observed that he had only two conditions for a prospective translator of his work: first, that she should be pretty, and second, that she shouldn’t take a personal interest in him – that way she’d be sure to concentrate on the job. In one of his more unguarded moments, he has confided to me that he does not need to watch the news, as he has the gift of foresight.

All the same, Ma Jian’s response strikes me as a little unfair. For Zhu Wen is a serious author masquerading as a joker; just as Didi de yanzou is a serious novella masquerading as a scurrilous burlesque.[5] He is, in short, a novelist suffering from an advanced case of bipolar disorder. In public, Zhu Wen plays down the idea of a literary vocation (he only drifted into writing, he claims, because his friends suggested he might be good at it), studiedly subverting the melodramatic May Fourth vision of literature as a kind of moral mission. But beneath its irony and slapstick, Zhu Wen’s fiction – the very opposite of carefree, or imperturbable – expresses a thoughtfully, provocatively dismal view of the China that surrounds him. “Writing is a way of intervening in life,” he has commented – a turn of phrase that recalls Maoist diktats to bourgeois authors to make their work relevant to the masses. “That’s what I wanted to do when I began. Whether you like Didi de yanzou or hate it, you have some kind of a response. That’s a good thing, I think.” In Zhu Wen’s hands, levity serves to accentuate the sobriety of his subject matter – not to ridicule it. It’s the intriguing contrast between his stories’ lightness of tone and grimness of content that succeeds in underscoring, without portentous overemphasis, the harshness of life in China today; that grabs readers’ attention and holds their interest. And with Didi de yanzou, grotesque farce is Zhu Wen’s vehicle for explaining the extraordinary tumult of the 1980s.

I wanted to find a way, a mode in which to write about this particular period – a period of over-excitement. I chose a kind of adolescent carnivalesque. And once I’d settled on this, all my characters had to fit in with it. They had to be symbolic, in some way – larger than life. So I turned them into cartoons. I felt that if I wanted to capture something of that period on paper, I had to write them like this. I wrote about sex so much because I felt that it said something about the characters. When you’re young, you think there are no limitations to anything, including sex. Their obsession with it was part of the whole fever, the delusion of youth – a delusion that the students could win against the government. Of course it was a tragedy – people lost their lives. But it was also a hallucination. I left the specific question of politics out of it because I thought the whole thing was more about rebelliousness, in general – a spirit of rebellion.

For Zhu Wen, then, hormones – as much as politics or economics – are the key to understanding the decade. (Though not necessarily, it should be remembered, to unravelling the specifics of spring 1989; the censors have so far kept him quiet on that particular, enormously complex sequence of events.) “Everything, everyone was over-excited,” the novella begins, “society, the economy, science, culture, sports, even politics…It was a catastrophe: the whole world seemed to be complaining its underpants were too tight. Everywhere you went, you heard disappointed sighs of premature ejaculation. Every single dream – the dream of becoming rich, or successful, the American, French, Japanese, even Turkish dreams – ended in premature ejaculation. Until eventually, pulling on clean underpants, we found ourselves in the 1990s.” (2)

What we’re left with, then, is a paradox: a novella whose apparently slapdash crudeness is part of a careful literary design; whose surface sensationalism overlies an audacious desire to probe difficult historical questions. For Zhu Wen, no subject is sacred: neither the establishment fantasy of a wholesome socialist civilisation, nor defiant student idealism. There are plenty of works of Chinese fiction written in the 1980s that seem rooted in the feverish cultural atmosphere of that decade; there are plenty of works written in the post-1989 period that are steeped in the crass materialism of the 1990s. There aren’t many that look back at the late 1980s from the subdued perspective of the 1990s, trying to make sense – within the censorial limits imposed by the Chinese government – of a period that the authorities would prefer to pretend never happened. For the time being, Didi de yanzou is one of the few that are available to us.

Then again, though, Zhu Wen would probably tell me not to take the whole thing so seriously. “It’s not a documentary. It’s only fiction, remember,” he reminded me when we last spoke.

Julia Lovell is a lecturer in Chinese history at London University, and her next book will be a new translation of the complete fiction of Lu Xun, to be published by Penguin Classics later this year. Her most recent piece for China Beat was "It's Just History: Patriotic Education in the PRC."

[1]Zhu Wen, Didi de yanzou (Shanghai: Shiji, 2007), 10. From here on, numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this edition.
[2]Unless otherwise specified, all direct quotations from Zhu Wen in this article are taken from an interview by the author on 23 June 2009.
[3]For a development of this idea, see Sebastian Veg’s review, “Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and other Stories of China, trans. with a foreword by Julia Lovell, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, 228 pp”, China Perspectives, 2007.1, at http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/document1503.html (accessed on 20 July 2009).
[4]http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4032543.ece (accessed on 20 July 2009).
[5]In this respect, Zhu Wen could be seen as following the example of the godfather of post-Mao cultural hooliganism, Wang Shuo. See, for example, Geremie Barmé’s discussion of Wang in In the Red (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 62-98.

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

By Haiyan Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screenshot of The Onion from NPR.

History, Generations, and China Stories

In early May, a conference was held at Yale for retiring Chinese historian Jonathan Spence, with several China Beatniks in attendance. Here, Robert Kapp, one of Jonathan Spence's first graduate students, reflects on the shifts in the stories we've told and heard about China during the time that Spence has been active in the field.

By Robert A. Kapp

The retirement of a distinguished scholar and doctoral mentor sometimes goes insufficiently remarked, but in the case of Jonathan Spence’s recent retirement from the Yale History faculty, something better happened. Happily, several of Spence’s Ph.D. students decided to throw their efforts into a conference and celebration in his honor, on the Yale Campus, in early May. The result was a most interesting and varied set of scholarly presentations, a warm and enthusiastic dinner event seasoned with warm reminiscences from generations of young and mid-career Chinese history scholars who received their early training from Spence, and a great many reunions of old friends with shared experiences of graduate life at Yale.

Four attendees in particular – Robert Oxnam, Roger DesForges, Sherman Cochran, and I – represented the original tranche of doctoral candidates who finished their degrees under Jonathan’s benign and helpful guidance. We were far and away the oldest Spence “products” in attendance; all of us began our graduate school lives as students of Spence’s own academic mentors, Professors Arthur F. and Mary C. Wright. Jonathan essentially inherited us from Mary Wright, in particular, as both we and Yale lost an inspiring senior scholar and came to know a brilliant and promising one at the start of what would become a brilliant career in the China field.

While most of the panels at the conference honoring Jonathan Spence consisted of research presentations – many of them on topics, and using tools of scholarly sleuthing – reminiscent of Jonathan’s own compelling works, the last session addressed “China Beyond the Academy,” in the form of a round table with five of Jonathan’s “products” who, over the years, either left academia altogether or who, while remaining active academics, engaged with broader audiences as a part of their China commitment.

These five included Prof. Yili Wu, of Albion College in Michigan; conference organizer Ken Pomeranz of UC Irvine; writer Stephen Platt of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Bob Oxnam, and me. Bob, of course, founded the China Council of the Asia Society in the 1970s and went on to become the Society’s president; I moved from teaching into the world of nonprofit membership associations, winding up as head of the US-China Business Council in Washington, D.C. from 1994 through 2004.

Putting thoughts on paper for this meeting was challenging but liberating, and I ultimately threw down a brief self-introduction, a section on some of the heroes and some of the writings that had affected me most as I led a life of “China Beyond the Academy,” and some additional reflections on the changing landscape and the lessons of “Beyond the Academy” life over what has now become a period of many decades.

With The China Beat’s permission, I’m happy to share the latter two sections here, and welcome comment.

A Few Heroes and a Few Cherished Readings: Marginalists, Contrarians

Jonathan Spence, To Change China: inoculation against self-delusion.
This early book by Spence, long a classic, made a permanent mark on me, with its tales of the mistaken assumptions and ultimately futile illusions of personal transformative influence in China that animated some historically important foreigners but, more often than not, led to disappointment. While not the only book of its theme, this one stayed with me, over the years, a constant reminder to guard against the susceptibilities that brought earlier generations to abrupt, sometimes devastating confrontations with Chinese realities.

Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time: the wedding of tragedy and farce.
I have written on The China Beat before about this book, an elegant and moving, alternately grim and hilarious, memoir of a young American’s experiences in Kuomintang-controlled China during World War II. The authorial voice in this endearing book, and the rhythm of Peck’s narrative descriptions, have, for me, never been rivaled. Contemplating the China of Peck’s observation against the backdrop of today’s China provides endless food for thought.

Robert McClellan, ­The Heathen Chinee: the enduring power of embedded vocabulary.
Robert McClellan remains an obscurity to me, known only through a couple of Web references. The Heathen Chinee, published in 1971 by Ohio State University Press, has never, to my knowledge, become a classic. But its vast assemblage of observations about China and the Chinese, and related imagery, from Boston Brahmins to California labor-movement exclusionists to clergymen and Congressmen and American literati of all sorts, has been valuable to me in thinking about American public and political attitudes toward China.

John Hersey, The Call: The possibilities of fiction. I don’t suppose that The Call has gone down as one of the great works of American literature, but I loved its combination of historical accuracy and engrossing narrative, of a young and unfocused man from upstate New York who hears “the Call” at a missionary lecture one evening and embarks on a life of bringing progress to China under the aegis of the YMCA. Many in lay audiences to whom I have introduced The Call have commented on its attractive power and its value as a learning tool.

Lars Erik Nelson and the Wen Ho Lee affair: majesty in the media.
The late Lars Erik Nelson of The New York Daily News is one of my heroes. His quiet, slashing article, “Washington: The Yellow Peril,” reviewing the infamous Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, in the New York Review of Books, July 15, 1999, exemplified, for me, the ability of the American press to right itself, and to right the American ship, even after the press itself creates the furies that nearly sink the ship in the first place. It is hard, now, to recreate the politically charged firestorm that swirled over China – and the Clinton Administration – in the mid- and late 1990s, but to have lived it is to remember it forever. Gradually, after the huge media onslaught (led by the New York Times, to its sad discredit, and fed by a familiar cast of Inside the Beltway predators) brought things to a very heavy boil, serious critical voices began to fight back. None was more dignified than Nelson’s.

It was, by the way, the fact that China in the 2000 elections, even after the four-year national security furore and the Congressional battle royal over Permanent Normal Trade status for China (PNTR) in the spring of 2000 itself, had no discernible effect on any races, for White House or Congress, that led me to conclude that it is fairly easy to ignite a fire over China in the U.S. but very difficult, if not impossible, to keep it burning for very long.

Dennis Blasko: The Unique Problem of the National Security Discourse.
Dennis Blasko is a retired Army Colonel with plenty of depth on Chinese military affairs, but I cite his book here not for its own uniqueness but for what Blasko represents: a professionally qualified specialist, in a field whose upper echelons remain shrouded from view behind the curtain of national security classification, who nevertheless writes and speaks with skeptical judgment about what is generally said inside the walls of the security community’s discourse on China. The divorce of the security dialogue on China from the rest of the multifaceted discussion of the PRC is, in my view, fraught with danger. Those without “standing” – in the form of employment, security classifications, and professional networks – can find it difficult to locate reality in the shadowy world of China military analysis. Those inside the walls – even the brightest and most responsible – are, in the main, socialized to discover worst-case situations and advice on preventive or retaliatory methods. The press, to the extent that it treats security issues at all, tends to receive and run with handouts from those “inside.” There is, however, a small cadre of credentialed specialists who place such reports in perspective, define and elucidate the real meanings of bandied terms, and generally bring balance to a discourse usually dominated by experts or polemicists to whom the laity is unequipped to respond. Dennis Blasko, then, is a representative figure, albeit a good one. His work and utterances, and those of others of similar intellectual bent, have long since earned my admiration.


Assorted Musings On a Day of Reminiscence

A. Generations. Whatever happened to Terry and the Pirates? Do they matter any more?

I guess another way of raising the Terry and the Pirates point would be to ask readers of China Beat: how many of you have heard of Terry and the Pirates (and the Dragon Lady)? Have you seen it? What do you make of it?

The larger point, obviously is this: have we now so left behind the experiences, once formative, of our encounter with China in the World War II context, that their residue has vanished? For those of us at the Spence conference who entered the China field as young graduate students in the mid-sixties (as the Vietnam War was also metastasizing), the likes of Terry and the Pirates informed our universe – and informed American politics. Four decades later, perhaps all of that baggage is now dropped forever. Maybe “Beyond the Academy” doesn’t matter now; maybe what we need to understand and convey off-campus starts with 1978, or 1989, or something like that. I’m not so sure.

(Then again, whatever happened to Beijing?)

This one is so obvious as to be sort of a throw-away, I guess. The photo was taken outside the Beijing Hotel on my first visit to China in January 1977. Those of us – and there are many – who have been in China for, now thirty-plus years, can’t help but remember how things used to be. Does it matter, when conveying our understandings of China “Beyond the Academy”? I believe it does, but I can understand why many people whose time in China began, say, only in the 1990s, or many Chinese people inside the country who came to mature consciousness only in the last fifteen years, might think otherwise.

(Or China’s Failure to Modernize?)

Well, yes. Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past is still, and will always be, a creative and elegant study. But the whole universe of “Why didn’t China…..?” questions, at least for those seeking to discuss China “Beyond the Academy,” has become quaint: who cares, it seems, about why China “failed” anymore, or why China didn’t have a “scientific revolution”? I am not here making the case for the permanent salience of the old questions, the ones on which we teethed as graduate students forty years ago. But, at a gathering built on reminiscence and recollection of formative years of academic training, it was hard not to come back to this question, with some predictable rubbing of the eyes. Who knows: what paradigms, forty years from NOW, will occasion the scratching of heads?

B. Language Language Language: In the end, it DOES matter. Generational contrasts.

The picture, of course, is “Honey,” from Doonesbury: Google her if she’s new to you. (I met the real person who inspired the character at a Thirty Years of US-China Diplomatic Relations conference in Beijing in January; an accomplished figure with a very, very interesting bi-national background.)

But the point is that, in the end, language is the foundation. The whole subject of “China Beyond the Academy” boils down to how we know what we know, as data and impressions are sifted through layer after layer of translation and interpretation. It’s not to say that complete fluency in Chinese is a prerequisite for standing; to put it the other way around, not having fluent Chinese reading and speaking ability is not an automatic disqualifier of those who would seek to tell others about China. But SOMEBODY in the process needs to have maximum language skills – in each direction. We’re better off than we were when the likes of me went through graduate school, but my overall impression is that we – the United States – still has a long way to go. I’ll let China speak for itself on the subject.

C. Parsing, and Communicating, the Multiplicity of Agendas, Still Challenges



By this point, I’m in the thrall of Google Images. A picture really can be worth many, many words – or at least can serve as a zippy illustration.

For the China Beyond the Academy ranks, motives and intentions, revealed or unrevealed, are a never-ending source of interest. Maybe, at this particular moment, Richard Nixon was simply thinking, “What IS it?”, and maybe Zhou Enlai was only thinking, “I certainly hope our distinguished American guest likes this delicacy,” but most of the time, in this and a myriad other encounters, the mental exercises are more multi-layered and the communication process both more nuanced and more perilous.

D. China as Foil, then and now:

“The Marching Chinese.” Ripley’s Believe It or Not, ca. 1910


“By the end of the year, China will be the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines.[1] The U.S. government's investment in wind is tiny compared to China's, and that means American workers are missing out on millions of new jobs.” (MoveOn.org, April 2009)

Don’t read too much into the visual similarities here, though I found them intriguing. The point is only that China has been, and sometimes remains a foil, a stage on which to play out foreign senses of thrill or danger. Times change: Ripley’s “The Marching Chinese” seems quaint while China’s industrial advances seem stark. But China as illustration, as a challenge from The Beyond, is still with us at times.

E. We each see what we’re equipped to recognize.

Again, this presentation was on “China Beyond the Academy.” The point of this picture – a shot of an anti-Gang of Four poster from January, 1977, was a lesson I learned on my first trip to China, with a University faculty group representing many disciplines. As we visited, the civil engineer among us would comment on the techniques, even the chemistries, involved in building the structures we passed on the street. The Russianist among us would see the Soviet Union in countless passing events or sights. The MD would note the medical conditions of passersby, immediately obvious to him but not to the rest of us. For myself, I would read the posters, vibrant with color against the dim and colorless background of Chinese cities in the first winter months after the end of the Cultural Revolution. What we can recognize pretty much frames what we see – and what we wind up conveying “Beyond the Academy.”

F. FINALLY: STAY HUMBLE


I am sure that only a handful of The China Beat readers will recognize me in the picture above, presented to me by the China staff of the US-China Business Council as a humorous farewell when I left in late 2004. Again, the picture is only for visual effect; the message is, Stay Humble. When China specialists “interpret” China for non-specialist audiences, whether in the schools, in civic groups, for the media, or for anyone else, we need to recognize the limits of our wisdom even as we assist others. Failure to do so will, to recapitulate my first book title above, surely lead to disappointment.

P.S. ABOUT THAT DISSERTATION…..

Pondering how to wrap up my short presentation to a conference honoring my doctoral advisor, I punched the name of the principal provincial militarist of Sichuan in the warlord era into Google Images, and hit paydirt at once. I had written for Spence on provincial militarism in Sichuan in the Republican era, and the heaviest hitter among the contending Sichuan warlords was one Liu Xiang (NOT, from the perspective of recent Olympics, THE Liu Xiang, of course). Here is what I found, another sign of a receding past to be reclassified, or perhaps forgotten.

Feb.10, 2009. Warlord Liu Xiang’s Chongqing Mansion Razed
　核心提示：抗战文物遗址——原川中大军阀、抗战名人刘湘位于重庆的死亡公馆2月9日被拆除，只剩下砖石和梁木，令文物专家十份惋惜





中新网2月9日电 9日，记者在重庆市渝中区化龙桥危旧房屋拆迁片区看到，该市一处抗战文物遗址——原川中大军阀、抗战名人刘湘的公馆被拆除。

据了解，刘湘公馆原是清末最后一任川东道尹柳善的府第，民国初期的四川大军阀刘湘花巨资买下 它整修后，作为川军21军的办公楼与接待政客的地。方，且在这里居住过多年。解放后，这里作为四川造纸研究所办公点，建筑得以完好保护目前，该公馆是重庆 市渝中区挂牌的文物保护建筑。

记者在施工现场看到，刘湘公馆原址只剩下了一片砖石和梁木。十多名施工人员站在瓦砾堆上，繁忙地搬运废弃的石木。

6日，记者曾来此采访。当时，刘湘公馆尚未被拆除，但也仅剩下主体建筑，并已被挖成一座矗立在施工工地中的“孤岛”。日前，经当地媒体报道，因该市化龙桥片区进行房屋拆迁，刘湘公馆去留的难测命运引起当地网民的热议，不少网民建议应对其进行保护。

在得知刘湘公馆被拆除后，一位不愿透露姓名的文物遗址保护专家表示十分惋惜：“刘湘公馆作为抗战文物遗址，具有很高的历史文化研究价值，被拆除十分可惜！” (本文来源：中国新闻网 作者：姜诚意)

It's so French

When we first saw the Shanghai Daily's headline on "Covering the China Beat," we thought it might be a piece about us, instead it was a review of (lively and acerbic Access Asia's) Paul French's new book, Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao. During June, French will be on the road in China flogging the book (check out the schedule of appearances here). French also keeps a personal blog at China Rhyming.

(Also, it should be noted that, in the spirit of headlines with multiple references, we chose this piece's headline from this book.)

By Paul French

Five foreign correspondents of the past I never tired of reading while doing my research for this book:

1) JOP Bland – the man who (about 1906) complained there were too many books on China being written and then promptly wrote about half a dozen himself (can’t not feel a kindred spirit there).

2) BL Putnam Weale – who decided mocking the pompous was not enough and dedicated his life to getting involved in one warlord intrigue after another until he got himself butchered and assassinated in Tianjin in some dodgy deal.

3) Aleko Lilius – who came to China with no other ambition than to find the most ruthless, cutthroat and down and dirty pirates of the South China Seas and hang out with them, did and wrote some great reports and a book about it

4) Edna Lee Booker – the first “girl reporter” on the China Press who famously disregarded the advice of the old China Hands and got the first interview ever given to a woman by the Old Marshal Zhang Zuolin, at the time China’s most feared Warlord before doing it again securing an interview with Wu “Jade Marshal” Peifu.

5) Peter Fleming – for the sheer gall of writing a book called One’s Company when he was never alone and went everywhere immaculately attired and for creating the image in his books of travelling light while always carrying with him a typewriter, a box of books, a gramophone, multiple bottles of brandy and his essential supplies of potted grouse and Stilton from Fortnum and Mason.

Five foreign correspondents I found myself wishing had written less:

1) G.E Morrison – a nasty and vicious man at heart who used people, stole their thunder and employed gossip and rumour to destroy careers.

2) George Bronson Rea – a notorious, vindictive and nasty right winger – wrote a book called the The Case for Manchoukuo – ‘nough said I hope.

3) Freda Utley – basically Utley divided everyone she worked with in the foreign press corps into two groups – those that she claims fancied her and those that refused to flirt with her. If you refused to flirt you got trashed pure and simple. She was a total narcissist.

4) Issachar Jacox Roberts - the Southern Baptist missionary preacher from Tennessee who had originally taught Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping, Christianity in Guangzhou. Roberts wrote in the Chinese Missionary Gleaner: “Behold, what God hath wrought! Not only opened China externally for the reception of the teachers of the gospel, but now one has risen up among themselves, who presents the true God for their adoration, and casts down idols with a mighty hand, to whom thousands and tens of thousands of people are collecting!” If he’d stayed at home and kept quiet it could have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

5) The entire Japanese Press Corps in Nanjing in 1937 – who virtually all to a man denied any atrocities had taken place until a few grudgingly changed their tune in the 1970s and 1980s and admitted what they had seen.

Five of the best by now totally forgotten China books from the early-to-mid 1900s:

1) Jay Denby, (1910) Letters of a Shanghai Griffin, Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh – China books are all so horrendously serious and self-important these days – Denby just made fun of taipans, pompous Shanghailanders and stupid diplomats, venal businessmen, etc. – we need a bit more of that.

2) Jacques Marcuse, (1968) The Peking Papers: Leaves from the Notebook of a China Correspondent, London: Arthur Barker. – a lot of memoirs these days are written by people who spent a year or three in China. Marcuse originally arrived in Shanghai in the 1930s to work for Le Monde and was still representing AFP in Peking in the 1960s. He was a member of the Chunking Contingent during the war but never became a fellow-traveller; though he was not slow to comment on those who did, describing Rewi Alley as “eminently useable rather than eminently useful”, the best description of him to date I think.

3) Ralph Shaw, (1973) Sin City, London: Everest Books – they’ll never be another memoir of Shanghai like Shaw’s – he switches from some useful analysis of the Japan invasion of Shanghai to his wild nightlife and sexual shenanigans in the space of a couple of paragraphs. This really should be reprinted to show all those hacks that write about Shanghai returning to the riotous thirties why they’re talking nonsense.

4) Ilona Ralf Sues, (1944) Shark’s Fin and Millet, New York: Garden City Publishing. – her politics went a bit dodgy towards the end but she has some great stories – interviewing Big Eared Du for instance and getting down among the opium smugglers.

5) Teddy White and Annalee Jacoby, (1946), Thunder Out of China, New York: William Sloane. – Thunder out of China sold by the bucket-load when it was published - over half a million copies at its first printing. White and Jacoby were under intense pressure throughout the war from Henry Luce to big up the Generalissimo and ignore the corruption – after the war they wrote what they’d really seen.

A News Story on School Collapses Tantalizes, Then Disappears

Yesterday, China Media Project’s David Bandurski published a post that highlights the best of what CMP does: muckraking in the China media and blogosphere, in this case regarding school construction in Sichuan. If CMP isn’t already on your RSS feed, we encourage you to add them. In the meantime, Bandurski kindly agreed to let us re-post this piece on the suppression of findings regarding shoddy school construction in Sichuan.

By David Bandurski

China Economic Weekly, a spin-off magazine of the official People’s Daily, ran an important story Monday about the collapse of school buildings in last year’s Sichuan earthquake. But the story, posted initially to People’s Daily Online, was removed by day’s end, a sign that some important officials at least were not pleased.

The original URL for the story at People’s Daily Online is now replaced with a tell-tale trace: “The page you wish to view no longer exists.”

Nevertheless, this is a story to keep your eyes on and one that amply illustrates the complexity of China’s media environment. Where did the story come from? Why was it allowed to appear at all?

The story’s jumping-off point is an academic study on construction quality in the quake zone launched last year by Tsinghua University, but it makes much more explicit the findings of the study as they are relevant to the problem of school collapses.

The story, by reporter Zhou Haibin (周海滨), uses the numbers in the Tsinghua study to make it clear that schools surveyed by a team of experts suffered far more crippling damage in the quake than did government buildings. For example, while 44 percent of government buildings studied were still deemed usable, having sustained little seismic damage, only 18 percent of school buildings studied were still deemed structurally sound.

The article quotes the author of the paper, professor Lu Xinzheng (陆新征) of Tsinghua University’s Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Project Research Center, as saying that . . .

. . . the severity of school collapses in the quake owed not to [the inadequacy of] our nation’s earthquake mitigation means and objectives. The problem [he says] is the [failure of] application of these preventive means and objectives in particular regions. He says that owing to China’s national characteristics (我国国情) and limited national [government] strength, the level of seismic resistance [for buildings] in many local areas was as low as .5 to 1.0 when it should have been 1.5 to 2.0.

The long and short of it: negligence by local government officials.

Lu Xinzheng runs a decent personal website in both Chinese and English, which includes PDF downloads of much of his research over the last few years. There’s contact information too, but we’re supposing the news has already cycled past the earthquake anniversary so far as those editors back in New York and London are concerned, right?

Anyhow, a list of Lu’s recent earthquake-related research is here. One of the most interesting papers is a study of the structural weaknesses of buildings in last year’s Wenchuan earthquake. In this study, Lu and his colleagues write about the notable thinness (and hence weakness) of vertical supporting columns in frame structured buildings in Sichuan, which either buckled or broke when the quake struck.

“In the Wenchuan earthquake, most of the many frame structured buildings that either were damaged or collapsed were of this sort, particularly spacious and open buildings that were purely frame structured (most of which were school classroom complexes, see figure 8),” Lu and his colleagues write.

Fortunately, yesterday’s story from China Economic Weekly has not disappeared altogether. As of 10:51am today the story was still available at Qingdao News.

The article’s headline also appeared today in a list of “recent news” in the Chongqing section of People’s Daily Online, and the link was still active, taking readers to this Chongqing page with the full text of the report.

A search in the WiseNews Chinese news database suggests the story also ran yesterday on CCTV’s international website, and on the website of China News Service.

A partial translation of the China Economic Weekly story follows:

Seismic Investigation Team Reveals Causes of Severity of School Collapses in the Wenchuan Earthquake
China Economic Weekly
Zhou Haibin (周海滨) reporting from Beijing and Sichuan

This reporter recently received a copy of an academic paper called “An Analysis of Seismic Damage Caused to Structures in the Wenchuan Earthquake,” written by a seismic investigation team from Tsinghua University, Southwest Jiaotong University and Beijing Jiaotong University. Of the 54 government buildings that the investigative team studied, 13 percent (or 7 buildings) were deemed to have been irreparably damaged [by the quake]. Of the 44 school buildings that they studied, this ratio was 57 percent (or 25 schools), more than four times the level [of damage] seen with government buildings.

Numbers reveal damage to be most serious among school buildings

After the earthquake struck on May 12 last year, Tsinghua University arranged for a team of relevant experts to travel to Sichuan, and they teamed up with civil engineers (土木结构方面专家) from Southwest Jiaotong University and Beijing Jiaotong University, making a series of three investigations into seismic damage to structures [in the earthquake zone].

The investigative team classed structures sustaining seismic damage into four categories: 1) usable, 2) usable pending repairs, 3) use to be ceased, and 4) immediate demolition. Buildings were divided into types according to their purpose: school, government, business, factory, hospital and other public buildings.

According to the statistical chart provided in the paper, China Economic Weekly has determined that 44 of the 384 structures studied were school buildings. The numbers provided in the chart reveal that of the 44 school buildings studied, 18 percent (or 8 buildings) were deemed usable, 25 percent (or 11 buildings) were deemed usable pending repairs, 23 percent (or 10 buildings) were labeled “use to be ceased” (unusable) and 34 percent (or 15 buildings) were recommended for immediate demolition.

In comparison, the percentages in all categories for the 54 government buildings were: 44 percent usable (24 buildings), 43 percent usable pending repairs (23 buildings), 9 percent “use to be ceased” (unusable) and 4 percent for immediate demolition (2 buildings).

The paper also points out that schools and industrial structures suffered more serious seismic damage due in part due to the functionality of their designs. Schools suffering seismic damage were largely structures of masonry, with large-spanning rooms, large openings for doors and windows, projecting corridors, and in some cases no allowances made for quake resistance, so that their earthquake resistance was low. Factory building were also largely masonry structures, usually of small scale and spaces consisting predominantly of parking areas where there were few personnel. For this reason, little consideration was given [in factory buildings] for earthquake resistance, and seismic damage was rather severe.

Government buildings mostly used reinforced concrete frameworks, and seismic damage to these was minimal . . .

Ever since the quake struck, public opinion in China and overseas has turned to the issue of construction quality in the quake zone. Addressing concerns about “tofu engineering” [shoddily built structures], Sichuan’s acting vice-governor Wei Hong (魏宏) said in answer to questions from reporters that the collapse of schools in this major earthquake was the unavoidable result of natural disaster.

The author of this paper, professor Lu Xinzheng (陆新征) of Tsinghua University’s Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Project Research Center, believes that the severity of school collapses in the quake owed not to [the inadequacy of] our nation’s earthquake mitigation means and objectives. The problem [he says] is the [failure of] application of these preventive means and objectives in particular regions. He says that owing to China’s national characteristics (我国国情) and limited national [government] strength, the level of seismic resistance [for buildings] in many local areas was as low as .5 to 1.0 when it should have been 1.5 to 2.0.

Images and the full text of the above article are available at the China Media Project website.

Creating Memory: J.G. Ballard and Shanghai

When news of Shanghai-born J.G. Ballard's death reached China Beat, we asked friend-of-the-blog Robert Bickers, author of Britain in China and Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai, to share his thoughts about the writer with us. He was kind enough to oblige, passing on these thoughts on Ballard's most famous novel, Empire of the Sun (subject, of course, of a Spielberg film), and also another work of fiction that uses Shanghai as a backdrop.

By Robert Bickers

They own him and disown him. “My brother was in his class at school,” one might tell you. “Why did he tell those lies about us in that book” another will ask. The ageing Shanghai British, solipsistic to the last, and acutely sensitive still about their history, were thrilled to have spawned a novelist (as they were a ballet dancer, Margot Fonteyn), but they were mostly bewildered by his work in general, and angry in particular at his book about them, 1994’s Empire of the Sun. But that book is not about them, of course, and it is not about Shanghai and is not about the war, although it uses all of these. In his autobiographically-derived fiction, the late J.G. Ballard pungently recreated the smell and flavour of the world they shared with him, weaving its strange way around the fixed points of their cityscape and their experiences, the Cathedral School, the Hongqiao road mansions, the internment camps at Longhua. This was a vivid recreation of their vanished lives, but as they saw their own landscape so carefully recomposed, so they saw themselves traduced by his characterizations.

They did not like what they saw in his book, but all that they saw there was themselves: British internees shown lazy and petulant in camp, expatriate householders lording it over their Chinese servants. But Ballard’s tale was more concerned with the strange flavour of a city, “90% Chinese and 100% Americanised,” at least as he saw it and recalled it in his 2008 memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, than with the Shanghai British. It suggests many ways in which the writer’s wider body of fiction had always been shaped by his childhood, as Mervyn Peake’s “Notes for a projected autobiography” shows how his childhood years in the London Missionary Society compound at Tianjin lay at the heart of the Gormenghast trilogy. Perhaps the key to the failure of the Shanghai British to understand Ballard’s book lies not so much in their failure to read it as fiction, and not so much in their concern with his portrayal of the British Shanghailander society of which Ballard’s life was such a part, but in their failure to understand that it is a book about America. In Shanghai ten thousand British residents found themselves surrounded by American culture (Chinese culture they mostly did not see). It was both directly imported and indirectly mediated, and I think no other community of Britons had such intense exposure at a time when British feelings about the United States and US cultural influence were ambivalent, to say the least. And the key foil to the fictional Jim, of course, and to the fictional British, is the slippery and resourceful American ship’s steward, Basie.

Shanghai, or “not Shanghai,” is the subject, or rather setting, of one other well-known recent English fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000). That tale of childhood (funny that both books are also about childhood) also prompted complaints about its use of the past, but in this case because Ishiguro did not research things quite properly enough: yes, Butterfield & Swire (whose manager in Shanghai is the protagonist’s father) was a leading British firm in the city, but no, it never dealt in opium, and no, it is not extinct. The company sued (the Shanghai British could only grouse at Ballard), and as a result the firm’s name was expunged from reprints of the novel. Ishiguro has a family link to the city too, his father was born there, his grandfather working there for Toyota, but the book is hardly concerned with the city in the way that Ishiguro’s script for the Merchant-Ivory movie The White Countess tried to be. Both the Ishiguro episode, and the response to Ballard’s novel remind us of the lingering continuities of the pre-1949 foreign Shanghai past, though neither book is truly about that past, and we forget that at our peril.

Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol, Co-Director of the British Inter-university China Centre, and leads the Historical Photographs of China project.

Around the Web…

In case you are interested in reading more from writers we’ve referenced recently or on topics we’ve been tracking lately, here are a few recommendations from this week.

The New York Times ran a set of commentaries yesterday on “what the Chinese want from Obama,” including commentaries by Michael Meyer and Daniel Bell (links to their previous pieces at China Beat).

Meyer writes about Clinton’s visit to China, and the power she has to shift discussions in China (and the U.S.) about China’s desire for an “American lifestyle”:

Yet as modernizing Chinese cities emulate America’s car-friendly designs — and often employ American architects, but not clean-energy firms to realize it — she could tie China’s urbanization into her broader agenda of engaging Beijing in a partnership to reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency, measures that would affect global health and the economy.

“If Chinese want to live the American way of life, then we need seven earths to support them,” the founder of China’s first environmental nongovernmental organization once told me. That impact is of less concern to a government funding large-scale urbanization in the service of economic growth. Planners and officials here often insist, with rightful indignation, that “we have every right to make the same development mistakes that America did.”

Mrs. Clinton could correct that perception with a visit to the hutong the way her husband galvanized AIDS awareness when he hugged an H.I.V.-positive girl at a Beijing speech in 2003.

Daniel Bell relays what his students think about Obama, emphasizing their resistance to “Obama mania”:

Of course, there is respect for Mr. Obama’s intellectual abilities and leadership skills. But even “liberal” students are given to skepticism. One of my graduate students told me that she was dismayed by the uncritical coverage of the inauguration, the kind of love-fest for a political leader that could only make the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party envious. We discussed, only half-jokingly, the possibility that China should adopt some form of constitutional monarchy, so that the public could project its emotions on a symbolic leader while evaluating the de facto political leader’s performance more rationally.

Of course, this “uncritical coverage” is rather debatable—since there was indeed a great deal of critical coverage of the inauguration and of Obama in the United States, but Bell’s point that the stories of Obama’s popularity in China have been hyped up is well taken.

We have mentioned James Hevia’s work on imperialism in China; he was quoted in a recent piece at The Christian Science Monitor on the Christie’s auction flap.

The "imperial objects are an absent presence in a tale of loss, humiliation, and the recovery of national sovereignty," says James Hevia, a professor at the University of Chicago and expert in European military traditions of plunder.

Last month, we ran a short list from Claire Conceison on Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng, taken from her work on his autobiography, Voices Carry. This week, she did an interview about the book on NPR’s Here and Now. You can listen by making a jump to Here and Now’s website.

Clinton’s visit to China was much in the news lately—a piece from Reuters discusses her indication to Beijing that human rights will not be at the top of the U.S.’s Sino-American agenda:

Making her first trip abroad as secretary of state, Clinton said three of her top priorities in Beijing will be addressing the global economic crisis, climate change and security challenges such as the North Korean nuclear weapons programme.

"Now, that doesn't mean that questions of Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, the whole range of challenges that we often engage on with the Chinese, are not part of the agenda," Clinton told reporters in Seoul before flying to Beijing. "But we pretty much know what they are going to say.

"We have to continue to press them but our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises," she added. "We have to have a dialogue that leads to an understanding and cooperation on each of those."

The environment is at the top of Clinton’s agenda, but it is as yet unclear what U.S.-China collaboration on this issue will look like. At his blog, James Fallows provided links to a new report from the Asia Society and the Pew Center that makes specific proposals for cooperation on energy and climate change.

Last week, we also ran a commentary from Ken Pomeranz about water in China. For an additional viewpoint, those in the New Haven area may be interested in an upcoming talk (on February 25) by Chunmiao Zheng on “Will China Run Out of Water?”