Kung Fu Panda, Go Home!

By Haiyan Lee

It seems that boycott fatigue has finally hit the Chinese, in a year that has lurched from one boycott to another—against such entities as a French supermarket chain, a Hollywood star, and an American cable channel. When the latest clarion call was issued by a performance artist named Zhao Bandi赵半狄 against Kung Fu Panda, he was greeted with jeers and mockery. Zhao presented his case in a blog: Hollywood is morally corrupt for churning out loathsome personalities like Sharon Stone (who betrayed schadenfreude over the Sichuan earthquake as “karmic retribution” for Tibet) and Steven Spielberg (who quit his role as artistic advisor to the Olympics over Sudan). Therefore it should not be allowed to profit, in China, and so soon after the earthquake, from China’s most iconic “national treasure” (国宝)—the panda. And for Chinese to help line the pockets of the Hollywood reprobates would be tantamount to stripping valuables off the bodies of the quake victims.



The banner that Zhao strung up outside the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, telling Kung Fu Panda to go home (《功夫熊猫》滚出去！), was taken down within 20 minutes by plainclothes police (see picture above). The movie opened in multiple cities on June 20 as scheduled to huge mirthful crowds. But Zhao’s effort was not a complete failure: the release of the movie was delayed for one day in Sichuan—home of the panda reserve and site of the earthquake—over concerns about possible “misperceptions” and hurt feelings. For this minor victory, Zhao received a phone call from an irate Sichuanese who gave him a bank account number and demanded that a suitable sum be deposited into it. For what? To compensate for the psychological loss he allegedly sustained for being prevented from enjoying the movie simultaneously with his dear compatriots throughout the rest of the country (全国人民)!

Most of the detractors simply regarded Zhao as a clown and a hypocrite, asking tongue-in-cheek if he had come down with a case of “boycott disease” (抵制病), or if he was jealous of Hollywood’s high-tech virtuosity. Zhao has indeed made a name for himself (“the Pandaman” 熊猫人) with his panda-themed performance art, most notably a goofy line of black-and-white and furry fashion gear (picture below). Apparently his being Chinese not only entitles him to playful (and gainful) appropriation of his national patrimony, but also obligates him to guard it against profiteering interlopers.



Given how favorably predisposed the Chinese generally were to the movie, it seems that Dreamworks has hit the right note in saying that the movie is intended to be a love letter to the Chinese and a tribute to Chinese culture. Audiences across China have indeed been duly pleased (and tickled) by the movie’s clever blend of made-in-Hong Kong kungfu lore, Chinatown chinoiserie, American teenage humor, and state-of-the-art animation technology. Commentators can’t seem to get over the realization that a didactic story （励志）could also be so fun, unlike so many Chinese-made “main-melody” (主旋律) fares featuring humorless, grandstanding heroes. Of course, the tried and true technique of defamiliarization is key here: a wok may be just a wok in a Chinese movie, but in Kung Fu Panda it is also a fight prop and hence an ingredient of hilarity. Other everyday objects too tumble through a riotous kungfu career: noodles, dumplings, chopsticks, and whatnot, cooking up a pandamonium unlike anything the Chinese audiences are accustomed to—with perhaps the exception of Stephen Chow’s manically droll Kungfu Hustle.

The subversion and parodying of kungfu movie conventions doesn’t stop with substituting woks and chopsticks for swords and nunchakus. Genre bending seems to come with the territory of global mass culture. If Zhao Bandi had spent some time pondering the losses and gains of commercialized cultural borrowing, including his own, he might come to see the movie not as the battered victim of cultural imperialism coming home to roost, but a celebration of middle-class values—hardworking and having faith in yourself—and a dramatization of the middle-class predicament—to live a life of ordinary fulfillment (such as carrying on the family noodle soup business) or to pursue lofty ambitions (such as becoming the dragon warrior and savior of the realm). These values and predicaments can hardly be stamped Chinese. They are rather the stuff of a bourgeois fairytale in an amusingly exotic (or, shall we say, multicultural) getup designed to ensure the movie’s global marketability. Po the panda is the classic involuntary hero, a burly version of Spiderman. Martial arts (kungfu), like Spiderman’s web or the Hulk’s gamma rays, is the magical force that enables the virtuous to triumph over the wicked who wields it for nefarious ends.

Yet Kung Fu Panda does Americanize the kungfu genre far more radically than, say, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This it does by playing fast and loose with a crucial genre device. On the surface, both movies honor the idea that supreme martial arts skills can be codified in writing and that the book—the Holy Grail of kungfu—is usually hidden in some secret location or jealously guarded by an impartial agent. In Crouching Tiger, Jade Fox steals the secret manual from her master because he would not transmit esoteric Wudang techniques to a female disciple. She then uses it clandestinely to train her young aristocratic mistress Jen to fight. However, she does not know that Jen is stealthily studying the text of the manual whereas she, being illiterate, can only make out the pictures. As a result, Jen blindsides Jade Fox when they are pitted against each other in a match. The assumption is that writing encodes greater cosmic-martial truth than image. Those who can read attain higher occult power than those who can only view. While this may sound hopelessly snooty in the age of YouTube, the basic idea still resonates in Chinese cultural spheres.

Variations of this idea can be found in most Chinese-language kungfu movies. The literary and martial arts are taken to be two sides of the same cosmic coin, or the Way. Both are said to be inspired by the tracks and movements of birds and beasts. Hence the same metaphors and protocols inform both the civil and martial domains, invariably urging the harmony of heaven, earth, and man. Zhang Yimou rehearses this idea to a fare-thee-well in Hero. In that movie, the king becomes enlightened of the essence of swordsmanship by mediating on the majestically rendered calligraphic character for “sword” (劍). Such hyperbole can strike an uninitiated viewer as all very “mystical and kungfu-y” (Po’s complaint against Master Shifu the red panda), if not downright silly. But a bona fide kungfu flick really can’t do without it. Just ask any kungfu junkie.

Interestingly, Crouching Tiger almost went without this essential device. James Schamus recalled that after his Taiwan-based scriptwriting partners perused his initial draft, they wanted to know where “the book” was. Apparently not understanding the special status of writing in Chinese culture, he had done away with “all the bother about who has the book, who stole the book, who understood the book and why the book was variously hidden, coded, burned, memorized, etc.” In the end, he was glad that his collaborators insisted on putting the book back in.

In Kung Fu Panda, the Holy Grail is the “dragon scroll” lodged securely in the mouth of a stone dragon on the high ceiling of the Jade Palace. It is destined, intones its guardian Master Oogway the tortoise, for the eye of the true dragon warrior. And yet when Po finally fetches it with the blessing of Shifu, he finds himself staring into a flimsy blank scroll with a reflective surface. The significance of the blank scroll eventually dawns on him when his goose father the noodle-maker confides to him that there is no such thing as the “secret ingredient of the secret recipe.” “Things become special,” he explains, “because people believe them to be special.”

Thus a homely American self-help maxim (dubbed “Hallmark-Fu” by a British reviewer) steals the thunder of oriental mysticism. Intriguingly, the image of the wordless scroll evokes the point I made in an earlier post about the ring as the forbidden symbol of power in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There I suggested that the imperative to destroy the ring is connected to the idea that power in a democracy is in theory an empty place. Here, the secret that is supposed to empower whoever possesses it once and for all turns out to be a hoax, so to speak. The hero (Po) and the villain (Tai Lung the leopard) are forced to fall back on their native moral endowments and painstakingly acquired martial capabilities. The quest is turned inward. And the true hero prevails because of the nobility of his purpose and because the people are on his side, not, in the last analysis, because he has the book.

Such is the coup pulled off by Kung Fu Panda against the genre to which it also pays earnest tribute. Audiences of course can enjoy the movie for whatever reasons, but at least part of the pleasure, I suspect, is coming from its cheeky deflation of the ponderous mood that sometimes weighs down the kungfu genre. If anyone should be upset about the movie, it should be the diehard kungfu aficionados. The movie has so upped the ante that future makers of kungfu movies will have to think twice before they whip out the ubiquitous book, however much it is rooted in Chinese cosmology. In this sense, Kung Fu Panda is a disarmingly cute and merry face of the global modernity that has made it impossible for anyone to lay claim to beloved cultural symbols as inviolable national patrimony.

Bourgeois Shanghai: Wang Anyi's Novel of Nostalgia

After the recent publication of a translation of Wang Anyi's 1995 novel A Song of Everlasting Sorrow, we asked Howard Choy to reflect on the novel's contents and importance. Below, Choy draws on his recently published work on late twentieth century Chinese fiction to contextualize Wang's Shanghai story.

By Howard Y. F. Choy

Among all the major cities in China, Shanghai has become the most popular in recent academic research and creative writings. This is partly a consequence of its resuscitation under Deng Xiaoping's (1904-1997) intensified economic reforms in the 1990s, and partly due to its unique experience during one hundred years (1843-1943) of colonization and the concomitant modernization that laid the foundation for the new Shanghai we see today. Many stories of Shanghai focus on the city's prosperous history from the late Qing dynasty to the end of World War II, during which time the French Concession, the British-American International Settlement, and later the Japanese occupation dominated the treaty port. For instance, Leo Ou-fan Lee's Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (1999) and Sherman Cochran's Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945 (1999) both conclude in 1945.

In this light, it is interesting to see that Wang Anyi begins her novel of Shanghai, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhen ge, 1995), not in the flourishing 1930s, but in late 1945, when Japan had surrendered and the "Paris of the East" danced its last colonial tango before the communist liberation. Wang Anyi's Shanghai affords entry to its residential lanes beyond the neon lights and at the end of nightly carnivals. Her Shanghai tale traces the changes of the city from pre-liberation times to the post-revolution days by following in the footsteps of a Miss Shanghai, as she walks along the longtang alleyways. It is her fellow townspeople's humdrum existence under the rumbling state machine that concerns Wang. Clothing, food, shelter and transport—all basic aspects of everyday life—are depicted in such detail that a social history is created against the grain of the grand narrative of political history. Effeminated in the contours of qipao and the fragrances of perfumes, Wang's Shanghai provides some counter-memories of communist China's revolutionary history through her nostalgia for the colonial past fantasized in the capitalist present.

It seems that Wang Anyi was not the only one feeling nostalgic at the turn of the millennium. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was so well received in China that it won the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Award in 2000. It was then presented on the stage by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center in 2004, cinematized by Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan in 2005, adapted for TV by Ding Hei in 2006, and recently translated into English by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). With this canonical work, Wang Anyi once again proves herself as a major figure in the scene of contemporary Chinese literature.

Spanning forty odd years from 1945 to 1986, the novel is tripartite. Book I is set in the glittery city of Shanghai during the latter half of the 1940s. Wang Qiyao, a glamorous girl from a lowly family who dreamed of becoming a movie star in her school days, takes third place in the first Miss Shanghai beauty contest after the war. She is then kept as a mistress by a politician, who is unfortunately killed in a plane crash in 1948. In Book II she retreats to the countryside and soon returns as a neighborhood nurse to the fallen city in the 1950s. Associating with three men—a profligate son of the rich, a half-Russian loafer, and a photographer—she gives birth to a girl out of wedlock in 1961. Largely skipping the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Book III covers the decade after the political turmoil. The protagonist spends a simple life with her daughter and young admirers in the reviving city until her daughter gets married and leaves for the United States. With its thinly veiled allusions to Lady Yang Yuhuan's (719-755) demise romanticized in Bo Juyi's (772-846) oft-quoted poem "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow," the story ends with Wang Qiyao's violent death while protecting a box of gold bars left to her by the politician. The last thing she sees on her deathbed is the mise en scène of a bedroom murder that she watched forty years ago in a film studio. Miss Shanghai Wang Qiyao's declining life from youth to old age can be understood synecdochically as Shanghai's vicissitudes from the postwar to the post-revolutionary periods.

Writing Shanghai women and writing Shanghai through women have a long tradition in modern Chinese fiction. Cao Juren's (1903-1972) literary comment has characterized the urban styles in terms of the female sex: “The Peking school (Jingpai) is like a boudoir-bound lady, whereas the Shanghai school (Haipai) is like a modern girl.” The lyrical writing of the romantic and the nostalgic has distinguished the Shanghai style from the didactic Peking style. Uncomplicated as the storyline appears, the novel is nearly four hundred pages long, because the author devotes her energy to nuances of the physical and psychological worlds instead of to an intricate plot. The prolonged descriptions in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow are redolent of the nineteenth-century romanticist Victor Hugo and naturalist Émile Zola. Its meticulous writing points ironically to the futility of life, resonating with Cao Xueqin's (1715-1763) classic Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), in which the once prosperous Prospect Garden falls into a lost paradise. The close attention to every bit of life as well as subtle emotional changes is enhanced by feminine sensibility. Like Cao Xueqin and Eileen Chang, Wang Anyi is good at in-depth depiction of the female psychology.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow starts with a five-page section describing old Shanghai's longtang alleys. From a bird's-eye view of the city, postwar Shanghai is read as a negative print: while the lights form punctuation and lines, the massive alleyways are the darkness behind them. It is not at night, but at daybreak when the narrator enters into the particulars of various classes of the longtang, making a tour from the stone-gate houses (shikumen) to shanty towns (penghu). Roofing tiles and roofing felt, roof ridge and roof dormer (laohuchuang), window frame and windowsill, wooden staircase and wooden partition, street lamp and street door, rear window and back door, iron gate and cement floor, wing-room and pavilion room (tingzijian), courtyard and parlor, kitchen and boudoir, terrace and balcony, gable and sewer—the domestic architecture is presented with the utmost exactitude as in a traditional Chinese realistic painting.

After this intimate invitation into the heart of the city, the reader is saddened to see that Shanghai is no longer the same city when its street names are decolonized and revolutionized. Thirty years after the liberation, the alleys are beaten-up, both the Huangpu River and Suzhou River are badly polluted, and the trams whose clanging bells sounded like the city's heartbeat have disappeared. The mechanical dingdong sound made by the tolling of a bell on the tram is frequently mentioned to invoke a nostalgic mood in the novel. After decades of suppression of material desires, in the first chapter of Book III we revisit the longtang and the houses connected by them—again under the author's descriptive guidance. While the apartment complexes' carved Romanesque designs have gathered dust and cobwebs, the Western-style houses' semicircular balconies are divided into two kitchens by the families residing in them. Gone are the splendor of all architectural adornments and the exquisiteness of the metropolis. Echoing her city-text simile at the outset of the novel, the author laments that the cityscape has become chaotic and unreadable, even though the old street names are now restored.

It is precisely because of Wang Anyi's focus on the cramped longtang, instead of the bustling Bund, as a sublime spectacle that Chinese critics read the novel as a postsocialist nostalgia of bourgeois Shanghai, hence the first example of an emerging middle-class literature in post-Mao China. The telos of proletarian revolution in twentieth-century Chinese literature is undercut by everyday concerns of the urban petty bourgeois in Wang's writing. The changing Shanghai lane-scape has accumulated a history, but the marginal culture of the longtang precludes a grande histoire. The trivial matters of everyday banality in alleyways reveal Shanghai people's apolitical and ahistorical attitude toward life. This philosophy of life prevails against the agenda of communist revolution. Mainland critic Zhang Qinghua thus concludes: "'Revolutionary Shanghai' seems never to be able to beat the 'urban petty bourgeois Shanghai'—revolution and politics stand above the roofs of Shanghai, but the daily life of the urban petty bourgeois is deep-seated in every alley and corner" (Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 2003, no. 2: 86).

Wang Qiyao is neither an all-conquering hero of the times nor a classical tragic hero against fate but, if I can be oxymoronic, a hero of everyday life. The quotidian 'hero' knows best how to lead the urban life under all circumstances. Such heroism lies in the self's immersion in the struggle for a livable life and material amenities. The materiality of the mundane world that Wang demonstrates is the city dwellers' device to distance themselves from state ideology. Of the basic necessities of life, clothing—read 'fashion'—is what Wang Qiyao hankers after. Pages of graphic details are given over to discussions and descriptions of her dress styles for the Miss Shanghai pageant. Concerning people's bodily relation to their garments, Eileen Chang has pointed out the politics in her 1943 essay "Chinese Life and Fashions": "In an age of political disorder, people were powerless to modify existing conditions closer to their ideal. All they could do was to create their own atmosphere, with clothes, which constitute for most men and all women their immediate environments. We live in our clothes." The space created by fashion on the body counteracts the sartorial practice of the Cultural Revolution, when personal style and Western dresses were considered to be bourgeois. The clothing space as the closest space next to the skin is the ultimate space that one should defend.

The politics of apparel lies in the wearer's retreat into the textile space, where the immediacy of attire allows the most direct expression of personal taste in times of prosperity and minimal comfort of the corporeal self in periods of turmoil. Following the change of regime in 1949, the 1950s lost city of Shanghai witnesses the replacement of Western-style men's suits by modified Sun Yat-sen suits (Zhongshan zhuang) and the gradual disappearance of the once fashionable Manchu banner gowns (qipao), whose modern version, cheongsam, has become more fitted and waisted to reveal the contours of the female body since the 1920s and 1930s. The Cultural Revolution is marked by its anti-fashion trend under the dominance of uniform blue cotton clothes. After the revolution, while her daughter and other young fashionists embrace the brave new world of street fashion, Wang Qiyao, seeing the origin of new fashions in the old styles, welcomes it as a reminder of her bourgeois experience in the bygone days.

The tedious descriptions of day-to-day bourgeois experience in Wang Anyi's nostalgic novel of Shanghai are commeasurable to the trivial round of daily life in the real world. Here the everydayness of urban middle-class life has dissolved the greatness of political grandiloquence. For Wang Anyi, history is not to be redeemed from major political events, but from minor personal matters, which the author often likens to leftover pieces of fabric. She sees history in private life, in its smallest trifles. Trifles are worth ruminating upon because they are the bits of the past that one was able to control (e.g., choice of one's clothing—at least its size and degree of cleanliness), is able to re-create (according to one's nostalgic desires), and will be able to engage (in one's daily routine). And this minimal freedom of the individual can be materialized only through the petty bourgeois practices in a consumer city such as Shanghai.

Howard Y. F. Choy is assistant professor at Wittenberg University. His research interests focus on Chinese culture and literature, with his most recent project being a comparative study of political jokes across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States.

(This article is an excerpt with minor revisions from the author’s Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng's China, 1979-1997 [Leiden: Brill, 2008], pp. 169-180.)

The Body Beautiful: Jonathan Spence's Final Reith Lecture

By Xu Guoqi

Jonathan Spence gave his fourth and last Reith lecture on “The Body Beautiful.” This is a perfect fit for China’s Olympic year and a wonderful conclusion talk after his first lecture on mind (“Confucian Ways”), then on Chinese interactions with the former superpower (the second lecture “English Lessons”), and the current one (the third lecture “American Dreams”). From mind to body, from China as an ancient civilization through its turbulent relations with Western powers to a nation which is determined to compete with the world in hard power either economically or physically, the topic was extremely well thought. The lecture was given at no better venue: Lord’s Cricket Ground, London, which will play an important role in the 2012 London Olympic Games, according to the host of the lecture. Everything seems great.

The 2008 BBC’s Reith lecturer entertained us with a brilliant explanation on issues such as ancient Chinese discussions of sports and athleticism, their practices of women’s Polo and men’s kickball roughly one thousand years ago, modern meets in the 20th century, and, most importantly, this year’s Olympics and its implications. His lecture also dealt with the transition from sports for the sake of personal character to sports in the name of nationalism. This is a great treat from a master. Listening to Spence’s many lectures always reminded me of Lao Zi’s political idea: “治大国若烹小鲜,” or it is the same to rule a big nation as to cook a small fish. Any topics for Spence, including this one, seem so easy for him to address, just like cooking a shrimp.

But it is exactly Spence’s brilliance that presented some problems for this lecture. As Daoist theory points out, misfortune can become a base of fortune, and fortune can lead to failure. In the short presentation, Spence dazzled us with all the great stuff, and like a talented chef, served us a delicious dish. But for some of us who are greedy, that dish tasted so good that we wanted more—a feast. For instance, Spence explained in a relatively detailed way China’s past participations in Olympic Games and touched upon the issue between Taipei and Beijing of who should represent China in the Olympic family. But he did not elaborate on Beijing’s withdrawal from the Olympic movement nor the PRC’s absence for over two decades from the most of the world’s sports activities.

One key issue in influencing Chinese attitudes toward body and sports was the label of China as “Sick Man of Asia.” But Spence did not pay attention to it in his lecture. Even after Rana Mitter, an Oxford China historian, asked him during the question and answer period about the impact of Social Darwinism on China’s sports, Spence responded by commenting on PRC’s obsession with the perfect athletic body, still ignoring the idea of the “Sick Man of Asia.”

Moreover, while Spence correctly emphasized two important elements which were important in influencing China’s body and sports, namely women’s foot-binding and men’s pigtails (or queue), he totally ignored the influence of civil service examinations, although he did mention military examinations. It seems to me that the civil service examination had a longer and deeper negative influence on Chinese body and Chinese attitudes toward sports than men’s pigtails, whose history was much shorter. The Reith lecturer began his talk with a discussion of Chinese ancient texts and philosophers’ thinking on body and sports, but did not examine Mencius’ famous argument that the man who works with his mind rules and man who labors with physical strength is ruled. This idea, I am afraid, greatly and negatively affected Chinese men’s attitude toward physical exercises for perhaps over one thousand years.

It is also interesting to notice that Spence mentioned that Chinese smoke cigarette, but did not make reference to opium’s influence on Chinese body and mind and the potential to affect their capacity to do sports. Since Spence gave a vivid description of polo, golf, kickball in ancient times, it might also have made sense for him to add in his lecture that the Chinese, especially the men, have been frustrated by their national men’s soccer teams’ frequent failure to enter the World Cup and thus have had serious doubt about the nation and even their manhood.

To be fair, some of the problems, of course, are not his fault at all and even beyond his control. Spence is a master. But as an interesting ancient Chinese story suggests, masters need zhiyin (知音)，or an audience who really understands his ideas. In that sense, the BBC and its Reith Lecture organizers might have to take some blame here since it seems to me that most members of the audiences (judged from the questions raised after the lecture) are either not China experts or seemed to be interested only in current affairs.

Among the eight individuals who took part in the Q and A, I got the impression that only Rana Mitter cared about theoretical and deep-seated historical issues. All other questions dealt either with the 2008 Olympic Games and how the Games would affect China politically and diplomatically, or China’s current attitude toward disabled people or other human rights issues. In addressing these questions, Spence basically argued that he did not expect to see the Games solve all crucial problems, and he did not agree that Chinese people were really discriminating against disabled people, although he had noticed that in Chinese buildings and transportations there were not enough facilities for these folks. It seems that many questions about current issues might go beyond the master’s expertise, while the master must often wonder where his zhiyin are.

Another problem for this Reith lecture is that Spence has less than 30 minutes lecture time to discuss the wide-ranging and complicated topics of the body beautiful. It would be amazing if Spence could accomplish this seemingly impossible mission with such limited time. A Tang poet once wrote, “春风得意马蹄疾，一日看尽长安花.” Or roughly put, when one feels so good it seems that everything can be done in a short time, including appreciating the beauty of all flowers in Tang’s capital in a single day. The master in this lecture did show us many beautiful flowers, but it is up to us to slowly appreciate and perhaps find out what he has left unexamined.

Confucius once famously declared that when he reached 70 years old, he would have whatever his heart desired, but would not depart from his established practice. Master Spence seems to have got closer to Confucius’ standard. No matter what topics he chooses or is invited to lecture on, the audience will get a typical treatment of Spence’s brilliance. Many of us in the China field have benefited enormously from Spence’s writings, lectures, influences, and manuscript evaluation reports. Thus it is fitting to conclude this piece by quoting Sima Qian, a master historian two thousand years ago, to express my admiration of Spence: “高山仰止,景行行之,虽不能至,心向往之.” Although most of us cannot even dream to reach Spence’s level, we all try hard to follow the master’s footprint and examples.

Xu Guoqi’s recent book, Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, published recently from Harvard University Press, has a detailed examination of Chinese attitude toward sports and body.

Our Women in China

Since late 2006, James Fallows has been providing regular coverage on China for The Atlantic Monthly. His first piece for the magazine was subtitled "Our Man in Shanghai..." and the retro phrase caught our eye not only for its imperial overtones (the frequency with which it is used to describe newspaper reporters is unnerving, since the phrase calls up Graham Greene's title, Our Man in Havana, a book about nothing so much as bad intelligence), but also for its gender implications. After all, "our man in China" is just as often a woman (as has been the case in the past; for instance, this report--dated language intact--from Time on their reporter Annalee Jacoby). Here are a few we follow regularly.

1. Luisa Lim has been reporting for NPR for more than two years, and her in-depth reporting has covered forced abortions, Thames Town (outside Shanghai), and her own difficulty reporting in China.

2. At the Wall Street Journal's "China Journal," Sky Canaves tracks the daily trends from Hong Kong.

3. Maureen Fan at the Washington Post makes an effort to include regular people in her detailed reports.

4. Luisa Lim is not alone at NPR. Not only has NPR created a homepage, "China: In the Spotlight," but this recent report on land seizures after the earthquake at "Marketplace" (broadcast on NPR) indicates that Lisa Chow is another lively voice on public radio (the end of the report, when Chow catches the party secretary red-handed attempting to seize local land, is alone worth a listen).

5. We've mentioned Sexy Beijing (and its frontwoman Anna Sophie Loewenberg) at China Beat before. Recently, though, Loewenberg has been doing features for "All Things Considered" (also on NPR). Listen here or view the full episode at YouTube.

Jonathan Spence’s Yale Lectures: A Memoir

One member of the China Beat team, Susan Jakes, has had the unusual experience of both taking Jonathan Spence’s famous “History of Modern China” course as a Yale undergraduate, and then later returning to the university as a graduate student and serving as a teaching assistant for a later version of the same class. As a complement to our series on Spence’s Reith Lectures, we asked her to reflect on this experience.

By Susan Jakes

I first heard Jonathan Spence give a lecture thirty minutes or so after the first time I heard his name. It was the beginning of my fourth semester at Yale in 1995 during the chaotic week known on campus as “shopping period,” when students are allowed to attend any classes they choose. My roommate had announced that she was going to “shop Spence” and invited me to join her. Fortunately, she wasn’t too aghast to bring me along after I’d replied, “Sure, I’ll come with you, but what’s Spence?”

I don’t remember precisely how she answered, but whatever she said persuaded me to get dressed in a hurry and follow her to Yale’s largest auditorium a full half hour before the first lecture of History of Modern China was scheduled to begin. As my roommate had predicted, the huge room filled up quickly. A few minutes after we arrived, a figure in a hooded coat slipped through the crowd toward the blackboard and began, silently, to fill it with a list of unfamiliar words written in slender uppercase letters. When he took the lectern, he made no sales-pitch to the assembled shoppers. He said only, “I’d like to start now” and began a lecture he called, “Ten Things I Find Fascinating About China.” I’ve lost the notes I took that day—though I’m fairly certain the list included the Three Gorges Dam, the future of the one-child policy and the legacy of June 4th—but what has stuck with me, indelibly, is how quickly after Spence began to speak I knew that anything he found fascinating was something I needed to hear more about.

I wasn’t the only one. When the lecture ended, there was applause. I don’t how long it lasted because my roommate, whose wisdom I was beginning to appreciate, insisted we sprint to the bookstore a block away and buy the books for the course before they sold out. Which they did. Before we’d even left the store.

*

Spence lectured three times a week that year, which meant he had about forty lectures to span the period from just before the Manchu conquest to the present, or roughly a decade per each 50 minute class. The course moved chronologically, but it did so at what felt like an unhurried pace, with time for detours into art or literature and often deep within the layers of individual lives.

The lectures had the feel of finely crafted short stories, and at times full-length novels. They were beguilingly titled—“The View from Below,” “All in the Translation,” “Into the World,” “Bombs and Pianos”—and they built in intensity to end in startling revelations or quietly delivered lines of poetry. Often they played on the juxtapositions in their titles to explore social tensions: “Famine and Finance,” “Sects and the Social Fabric,” “Warlords and Bandits,” “Socialists and Revisionists.” Spence liked to put two biographical sketches side by side to capture different dimensions of a given moment, a technique he used to electrifying effect on Yuan Mei and Zhang Xuecheng in the “The Poet and the Historian,” and on writers Ding Ling and Xu Zhimo in a lecture called “Being Modern.”

Even in less experimental modes, he always put individuals front and center. No event worth mentioning was too large to be refracted through a single human life and no life was too minor to have its humanity summoned up from the past alongside the abstraction of its historical significance. Spence could manage this level of detail even in a 50 minute lecture because of his knack for drawing a profile out of a single image—the Kangxi Emperor advising a bondservant on his health, Ding Ling’s mother running around an athletic field on her newly unbound feet, a Boxer victim’s Steinway piano, Mao aboard his private train. He could “catch the essence,” as he sometimes describes it, of people and of historical moments so they lit up like lightning bugs in a jar.

Not that his delivery was flashy. He spoke casually, musingly, from behind a sheaf of yellow notepaper, in a way that sometimes made it sound as if what he was saying was only dawning on him at the moment he said it. The effect was disarming. There was an open-endedness about the way he presented even the subjects he knew best that invited us to feel a part of them. Seldom did a lecture not include the phrase, “I’ve always hoped someone would write an essay on this subject.” Questions were as much a part of the lectures as exposition and from time to time he answered them, “Well, we’re not sure.” But for the most part, his lectures held out the promise that China and its past could be, if not quite within our reach, than at least a little closer than they seemed.

Among some of my classmates this promise produced an almost instantaneous decision to reorient their studies or move to China. I came more hesitantly to the subject and the country, but I am sitting in Shanghai as I write this, quite as certain as one can be about historical causes and effect, that had I not found my way to that lecture hall in the spring of 1995, or if Spence had been lecturing on astrophysics or on Luxembourg, I would not be here.

*

That first Spence lecture was very much on my mind this January as I returned to the auditorium, amid the hubbub of another shopping period, to hear Spence teach a course now called “History of China: 1600 to the Present”—this time as a graduate student and one of his teaching assistants. Little had changed at Yale in the intervening 13 years, but China was a different place or at least it meant something different to my students than it had to me. During my first meetings with them I asked them to write a few sentences about why they were taking the course. A few wrote that they had heard the class was excellent or that Spence was “awesome.” But the vast majority explained their interest in terms of China’s prominence in world affairs, its power, its “rise.” Some of them explicitly related their interest to future careers in business. One described the class as “a necessity.” They were at least as interested in China’s future as they were in hearing about its past.

That China had become a much more forceful presence in the consciousness of his students must have been on Spence’s mind as he began his first lecture. He spoke about what he called “the extraordinary drama of emotions aroused by China,” and said he found “depressing” the recent “great emphasis on the negative aspects of China.” In place of 1995’s list of ten fascinating things, he gave two lists, one on China’s frequently emphasized negative sides (pollution, corruption, tainted products, Tibet, etc.) and the other on developments he saw as more encouraging, including “the development of urban restoration” and “Chinese presence in Africa” along with the transformation of the middle class, stability in recent leadership transitions, the Olympics and the fact that “China [was] working enormously hard on energy.”

If I found it hard to share his optimism on some of these counts, I was reminded at the end of that first lecture of just how much change in China’s present Spence has witnessed in the years he has been studying its past. “I started out studying China here at Yale in 1959,” he told the final group of students who would hear him teach the course, “We weren’t being told very much...We really didn’t realize that one of the largest famines in China was happening—a missing cohort of 20 million to 30 million people…The People’s Republic was only 10 years old—now it’s 58 years old and somewhere in there is my life.”

This year’s lectures moved more briskly than they had in 1995. There were only two a week now and an extra decade to cover. But even in more compressed form they teemed with the kind of detail that had captivated me the first time around. Spence reflected more often about the development of his scholarship, and on his own encounters with contemporary China. Often when the class ended, he would climb down to the corner of the room where the teaching assistants sat and regale us with anecdotes or questions he hadn’t had time to include in the formal part of the class.

One side of the class I hadn’t remembered was the way Spence used humor, the way his formal British diction could give way to a reference to Kangxi as Yongzheng’s “old man” or a description of people in the 17th century “visiting tea houses for R&R.” He likened the life of a low-level Chinese scholar to “being trapped in high school your entire life—a grim prospect for many of us.” When the Yankee Doodle, a local greasy spoon where Spence had eaten his first American meal in 1959 closed its doors this winter, he asked the class for a moment of silence. Then he said, “Don’t write this on the midterm but Kangxi would have liked the Doodle and Qianlong wouldn’t have gone near it and that may explain my feelings about those two emperors.” Watching my students respond to these moments of playfulness, the way their affection and awe for their teacher drew them closer to his subject, I understood a little better how I had wound up where I was.

*

Spence used his final lecture to explore seven “enduring themes” in Chinese life that spanned the four centuries covered in the course—and new pressures on Chinese society. Another two lists. The first included the absence of permitted public debate on leadership transition, the closeness to power of highly educated male elites, the lack of a powerful nationwide religious structure, “good order” as a high state priority, changing borders and ideas about borders, pressure on scarce resources and rich aesthetic and cultural realms including wit, erudition, sensuality and history. Among the new stresses were the internationalization of China’s strategic interests, the scale of urbanization, the collective leadership of the CCP, the availability of capital for “colossal projects,” environmental degradation, the battle for control of information technology and “seeing China as a source of change for the rest of the world.”

In closing, Spence turned toward one last enduring theme, one that was much closer to home and yet more fleeting. To an unusually packed house full of former as well as current students and a good number of colleagues, he read aloud Mark Strand’s poem, “The Whole Story.”

How it should happen this way
I am not sure, but you
Are sitting next to me,
Minding your own business
When all of a sudden I see
A fire out the window.

I nudge you and say,
“That’s a fire. And what’s more,
We can’t do anything about it,
Because we’re on this train, see?”
You give me an odd look
As though I had said too much.

But for all you know I may
Have a passion for fires,
And travel by train to keep
From having to put them out.
It may be that trains
Can kindle a love of fire.

I might even suspect
That you are a fireman
In disguise. And then again
I might be wrong. Maybe
You are the one
Who loves a good fire. Who knows?

Perhaps you are elsewhere,
Deciding that with no place
To go you should not
Take a train. And I,
Seeing my own face in the window,
May have lied about the fire.

“The only gloss you need is that ‘train’ is Yale,” he had said as he began to read, “and the fire is China.”

Ping Pong Diplomacy Revisited

With “Ping Pong Diplomacy” back in the news recently, thanks to a rematch between Chinese and American table tennis players that made headlines on both sides of the Pacific, China Beat asked historian Xu Guoqi to write a short piece for us reflecting on the topic. As a specialist in Chinese international relations and the author of a new book that places the Beijing Games into historical perspective, he seemed an ideal person to weigh in on this subject.

By Xu Guoqi

2008 is China’s Olympic year, which means that the world is watching that country through the lens of both sports and politics. However, this is not the first time China has attracted global attention because of sports. The 1971-1972 Ping Pong diplomacy that Mao Zedong played with the Americans had more serious consequences than this year’s Beijing Olympic Games, since the result of the Ping Pong friendship games fundamentally changed the international political scene and reshaped the world order.

Thirty-eight years later, however, when the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library celebrated the historical moment earlier this month by hosting an event called “American/Chinese Ping Pong Diplomacy: the rematch,” many people still didn’t know very much about the true story of what happened in the early 1970s or had forgotten parts of the tale that they once knew. In some cases, newspaper reports in very respectable periodicals even got some basic historical facts wrong. Two recent articles on the rematch, described below, are cases in points that illustrate a general pattern.

The first of these, published on June 13 in the Los Angeles Times and titled “Cold War-era Ping Pong foes meet for some back-and-forth,” includes several ideas that are debatable at best. For instance, the article says that “Ping Pong is to China what soccer is to Brazil, and Geliang is the Pele of Chinese Ping Pong.” The Chinese might be dominate players at Ping Pong but today’s Chinese share the same passion and obsession as the Brazilians for the “beautiful game,” namely soccer. And while Chinese men’s soccer teams have not won many international matches, the Chinese women’s soccer team has done very well in major tournaments and the Olympics. During the era of Ping Pong diplomacy, moreover, the “Pele” of Ping Pong was Zhuang Zedong not Liang Geliang (Geliang is his given name). Even today, more Chinese probably remember Zhuang than Liang.

These may seem only trivia issues, but a crucial fact is blurred in an article posted on the New York Times website on June 10. Titled “China and the U.S.: Ping Pong diplomacy, 38 years later,” it describes Zhou Enlai inviting the American Ping Pong team to visit China in spring 1917. However, Premier Zhou did not want to invite the Americans that year and recommended to Mao that this not be done. It was Mao who in the last minute vetoed Zhou’s recommendation and single-handedly decided to invite the team and thus started the famous Ping Pong diplomacy. In other words, Zhou might have gotten to serve as the happy and effective messenger, but Mao was the person who wrote the message. This article also got another smaller fact wrong. It claimed that the three-day tournament in the Nixon Library would include a match between two of the original players, Tim Boggan and Liang Geliang. It is true that Liang was an original player, but Boggan was not. In fact, Boggan went to Beijing in spring 1971 not as a player but as an official of the U.S. Table Tennis association.

These may seem like small points, but in a matter as historically significant as the opening of relations between two of the world’s great powers, the details do count. And as anyone who follows sports knows, in the realm of athletics little errors can quickly add up and become consequential. The same can be true with the history of international relations.

Xu Guoqi’s latest book, Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, includes a detailed study of Ping Pong diplomacy.

Jonathan Spence’s Third Reith Lecture: Dreams, Paradoxes, and The Uses of History

By Charles W. Hayford

In the third lecture of the Chinese Vistas series, “American Dreams,” Jonathan Spence talked about American dreams of China and, more tantalizing, Chinese dreams of America. He sees a series of “paradoxes” from the American Revolution to the present which set Chinese and American dreams at odds.

In the question period, another paradox emerged, one between different uses of history. The lecture was broadcast from the Asia Society on Park Avenue in New York, where the initial questions came from Richard Holbrooke, President of the Asia Society and heavyweight diplomat, and Henry Kissinger, an even heavier weight (Spence had written about him, so it must have seemed strange). The questions asked if China had been more xenophobic than other countries, if industrialization would change Chinese mentalities, if China would be expansionist, and so on.

After responding to several questions, Spence started his answer to another by saying “I don’t know.” This was refreshing but perhaps it was also a tactful rebuke to the type of questions he was getting. Spence is not a present minded policy advisor, he is a public intellectual who writes about history to address questions of general meaning. Another Qing historian was recently asked what he told policy makers who sought his advice. He replied “as little as possible.” One of the few authentic lessons of history is that history does not offer “lessons,” much less predictions or tips on the horses, only stories of complications and confusion.

Of course, we might conclude, along with my Alan Baumler, my colleague at Frog in a Well, that Chinese History Sucks, but we could also just admit that historians are a feisty bunch and that they work in different ways.

Some historians use explicit theory to fit their material into patterns and compare it to other times and places. Theory works for them but tends to limit their audience to fellow academics. Other historians, including Spence, want to show us what is often called “the strangeness of the past.” Like poets, they give us the particular and the peculiar. Spence takes contemporary poetry seriously but his favored genre is biography, which by nature does not demand theoretical generalization and PhDs tend to avoid it.

Yet Spence’s work shows that writing history without explicit theory does not have to be mere antiquarianism nor do biographies of unrepresentative people have to be, in the phrase of a contemptuous scientist, “stamp collecting.”

Spence’s To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960 (Little Brown, 1969) almost off-handedly set up a framework which we all still use. The biographical sketches, a seeming patchwork, start with the Jesuits, then tip toe through several Protestant missionaries, Michael Borodin, and Joseph Stilwell.

These “China helpers” certainly showed the “strangeness of the past” and Spence did not connect them to the Vietnam War, but he put his judgments clearly in the “Conclusions”: After a long cycle, China regained the right of “defining her own values and dreaming her own dreams without alien interference,” so the virulent anti-imperialist pronouncements of the 1960s were a “paradoxical combination of hostility and relief.” Westerners had thought that packaging technology and Western values together would change China. They were wrong.

The phrase “to change China” entered our vocabulary, but to my mind Spence’s most fruitful book on East-West perceptions is The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (1998), originally a series of lectures. It’s a tour de force of insights yet there is scarcely a theoretical generalization in it, simply groupings of Western “sightings” of China. Like a good host at a party, without seeming to strain, Spence introduces us to any number of voluble guests from history and by his craft lets them tell their stories. Among his subjects was Henry Kissinger, whose memoirs portrayed Mao in the “grand exotic tradition of the Chinese emperor,” ascribing “enormous calculation and cunning.”

Which brings us back to the Reith Lectures and the series of paradoxes. Spence at one point confesses that he “jotted down” ideas for the paradoxes, and, to be honest, some of them seem forced. The initial paradox involves Americans on board the ship Empress of China who arrived in Canton in 1784. The British there apologized for the recent wars and offered their support: together, we’re unbeatable. On the other side, the Chinese government forbade the teaching of the Chinese language on pain of death (Chinese language teachers should have a prize in memory of Liu Yabian, who was executed in 1759 for that crime).

Spence inserts a fascinating little discussion of a problem in political science which frustrated the Chinese. In figuring out the nature of the American system they debated how to translate the word “president” – should it be “head man”? At one point baffled translators simply call him “huangdi,” or “emperor.”

The next paradox was that Protestant translations of the Bible sparked the Taiping Rebellion which the Christian powers then supported the imperial government in suppressing. Another was that sympathy for the Chinese Republic did not mean that Wilson’s call for self-determination was extended to Asia. Chinese who dreamt that their own world would be made safe for democracy felt betrayed by Versailles, a partial explanation for the bitterness and complexity of the 1920s radical revolution.

American missionaries and the YMCA brought a package of technical aid, education, science, and Christianity, but the Nationalist Party unbundled it and removed the democratic values. An even more bitter paradox was between Open Door paternalism and American refusal to confront Japanese aggression until the attack on Pearl Harbor.

These are some of the well turned vignettes, but they leave me wanting something richer. I’d like to have heard Spence take the whole four lectures to talk about any one of the topics. Then we’d have more gems like that fact that in the nineteenth century there were ninety different Chinese terms for “America.”

If Chinese had trouble fitting concepts such as “president” into Chinese, English lacked important words to fit what Westerners saw in China. In the second lecture Spence remarked on the usefulness of Pidgin, which, like chop suey, has been disrespected for fear that it’s not “authentic,” whatever that means, there was also a China Coast vocabulary. For instance, government office in England and North America was allotted by patronage or aristocratic inheritance, but China had no aristocracy, so office was given on merit as determined by examination. What word would translate guan? The British adopted “mandarin” from Malay, originally from the Sanskrit for “official.” Did there need to be a new word for “common laborer”? “Coolie” was taken from Hindi to fill the gap (it later made its way into Chinese).

I’d be willing to skip lunch to hear Spence talk about this and how he chose the word “dreams” for the title of this talk. Of course, dreams come up often in his writings, such as Hong Xiuquan’s dreams of his Heavenly Father in God's Chinese Son : The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (Norton 1996), and in the common Chinese view dreams reveal alternative realities. I can see why Spence passed over “images,” which is tired and misleading, even though many works used it creatively. The metaphor behind the word implies that China is just passively out there and impinges on our eyeballs and is interpreted by our brains. The process only goes one way. An image just sort of happens spontaneously, not like an analysis or interpretation or observation or representation or construction, which require thought.

In the end, the policy questions from Holbrooke and Kissinger miss Spence’s point. History is definitely (in another historians’ cliché) the search for a “usable past,” but not for answers to a quiz. No prognostications. When the United States and China wake up from their “American dreams,” the policy makers take charge, not historians. We can only hope that their eyes have been trained by history as they deal with the “strangeness of the present.”

Charles W. Hayford is Visiting Scholar, Department of History, Northwestern University, and Editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations.

Jesus in China—Evan Osnos on an Upcoming Frontline Documentary

The Public Broadcasting Corporation’s Frontline series has a long tradition of airing documentaries on China. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s prize-winning look at 1989, “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” was shown as part of the series, for example, as was a later Tiananmen documentary, “The Tank Man.” And thanks to the online extras, from guides to further reading to lesson plans for teachers, the PBS Frontline site has become a valuable resource for those who offer classes or simply want to learn about the PRC. Still, it is rare (probably unprecedented) for two China shows to run back-to-back on Frontline. But that is just what is happening now, as yet another sign that 2008 is no ordinary year where either Chinese events or international fascination with China are concerned. Last week’s “Young and Restless in China,” which was the subject of an earlier China Beat post and has become the latest Frontline show to be supplemented by online classroom-friendly features, is about to be followed by “Jesus in China,” which premieres June 24.

No one at China Beat has seen the show yet. But we did check out the materials available in advance online, which include a “video diary” featuring Chicago Tribune reporter Evans Osnos. So, we decided to pose a few questions by e-mail to the award-winning journalist, who along with his involvement in the film has continued to file reports on the earthquake and other breaking news stories for the Tribune and has also begun to write occasionally for The New Yorker. Here is what he had to say about “Jesus in China” and the general topic of the surge of Christianity in the PRC, which is also the subject of a series he’s doing in print, beginning with this piece published today.

CB: Is this your first experience working on a documentary film?

EO: Yes, if we don't include—and we shouldn't—my brief tenure as a student documentary-maker some years ago.

CB: You note in your video diary that one big shift that has taken place since you first went to China is the increased visibility of Christians and the sheer number of them. Do you think of the rise of Christianity mainly as a subset of a larger phenomenon, such as a turn toward spirituality more generally that has also seen an increase in the popularity of other imported and local religions? Or do you see it as something that is completely distinctive?

EO: The rise of Christianity in China is part of a broader spiritual awakening. People are seeking new sources of guidance everywhere, from mystical Taoist sects to the Bahai faith. Among the measures of that, a survey by East China Normal University found that nearly a third of those polled described themselves religious. In particular, the rising middle class seems to be searching for a kind of moral reference as they confront new social and economic choices. One of the interesting things about Chinese Christians is that we don't yet know what kind of social positions they will endorse: Will the mainstream of Christianity in China be a form of liberal Protestantism familiar in some American churches or will it be closer to the conservative brand that is thriving in the developing world?

CB: What struck you as most exciting or perhaps most daunting about trying to convey ideas about China via involvement in film as opposed towriting on your own for the Chicago Tribune or The New Yorker?

EO: Writing for the Tribune and The New Yorker is a fairly solitary exercise. I tend to spend a lot of time with people I'm profiling, but, otherwise, there are no other journalists in the room. And the process of writing, of course, is one of staring at a blank empty page until a story appears. But this project meant hashing out story ideas and strategy with a team of talented people, and that was terrific. Luckily, Cassandra Herrman, an incredibly talented producer, came to China for a month to oversee the production for Frontline/World. I've written two Tribune pieces to run alongside the film, and they tell related but separate stories than what we followed with the cameras.

CB: When China Beat ran a piece on the last Frontline episode, about young people in China, we paired discussion of the film with discussion of Duncan Hewitt's Getting Rich First, a book by a journalist that dealt with similar issues. Is there any book or article you've come across lately that you think would make particularly appropriate reading to pair with the "Jesus in China"?

EO: I recommend several things:
--The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a valuable report on China, including survey and demographic trends.
--The Council on Foreign Relations last week conducted a day-long seminar on religion in China. Most of the transcripts are available here.
--The CFR also has a useful backgrounder.
--The latest U.S. State Dept. report on International Religious Freedom describes how laws on religious expression are implanted.
--Christian writers have produced a range of books and articles—too many to list—but a frequently-cited text is the updated edition of Jesus in Beijing, by David Aikman, which includes a history of the growth of the church.


For China Beat readers who would like further information on the history of Christianity in China, we also recommend the following sources:
Christianity in China, edited by Daniel Bays
Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857-1927, by Ryan Dunch
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, by Jonathan Spence
To Change China: Western Advisors in China, by Jonathan Spence
“’A Penny for the Little Chinese’: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843-1951,” by Henrietta Harrison (from American Historical Review 113:72-92, February 2008)

Charles Tilly’s Influence on the China Field

Editor's note: This post inaugurates an occasional China Beat feature in which we will look back at the lives and careers of writers whose work has had an impact on Chinese studies. Usually, these figures will be China specialists, but in this case, the influential figure in question, Charles Tilly (pictured below), worked primarily on another part of the world. There is no question, though, that via his activities as a teacher and author he had a profound influence within Chinese studies, as becomes clear from the following comments by Daniel Little, author of Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science and Chancellor of University of Michigan-Dearborn.

By Daniel Little

Charles Tilly (“Chuck” to his friends and colleagues) was one of the world’s most influential social scientists, and his impact on Chinese studies will be long-lasting. His death on April 29, 2008, was a sad loss for many scholarly communities as well as for his friends and family. (See the SSRC memorial page, which includes a series of remembrances about Tilly. Chuck talks in fascinating detail about the evolution of his thinking in a video interview I conducted with him in December 2007.) Tilly was a comparative historical sociologist with a primary interest in French contentious politics, and his writings have had deep impact on several generations of scholars. He helped to define much of the theoretical vocabulary that scholars use to frame their theories and hypotheses about social change, contentious politics, and state formation. The central focus of his empirical and historical research was on France, with important and illuminating treatments of revolution, counter-revolution, popular politics, and mobilization from the Revolution to the Paris uprising of 1968.


(Ed Note: If you would like to see more video like that above, there are seven additional parts to this interview, which you can view at YouTube by following this link.)

Chuck was often immersed in the historical specificities of French politics; but his mind always turned to theorizing and conceptualizing the circumstances he studied. And this meant that all of world history was of interest to Chuck. In particular, Chuck paid close attention to the recent literature in Chinese history. Astute references to current research on China can be found throughout many of his later books, including The Politics of Collective Violence. He was always most interested in discovering the “why” of the events that he observed – and how these “why’s” might be portable into other historical settings as well. (One of his last books carried the simple title, Why?.) This is what marked him as a comparative historical sociologist, rather than an historian using the tools of the social sciences. He wanted to understand what explained the course of the large processes he studied, and he felt this was most achievable through comparison across cases. Another title of Chuck’s puts the point vividly: Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. Here Chuck signals his theoretical interests: discovering the “how and why” of large social processes, and discovering what we can learn about social processes through careful comparison across settings.

A very important development in Tilly’s thought was the turn to causal mechanisms rather than social generalizations as the foundation of explanations of large social outcomes and processes -- things like social contention, civil war, or revolution. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly worked out the details of this view in Dynamics of Contention. They argue that explanations of large social outcomes should be constructed by discovering the specific causal mechanisms present in the cases, rather than hoping to find a few high-level generalizations about “the causes of civil wars” or “general laws of ethnic violence.” And, it turns out, the idea of historical change as a concatenation of a number of social mechanisms is particularly useful in coming to grips with Chinese history.

Chuck’s central historical contributions were to European studies. So what does all this have to do with the China field? Quite a bit, it turns out. Chuck exercised a deep level of influence over a number of important strands of research in Chinese history and historical sociology. His thinking worked its way deeply into the intellectual “DNA” of young researchers in many fields of history and the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s – with the result that his influence can be seen across the range of world histories, including Asian history, Latin American history, and African history.

This occurred through several pathways. First, Chuck’s personal influence on graduate students at Michigan, the New School, and Columbia was enormous. The Center for Research on Social Organization at Michigan was a hotbed of innovative thinking about social research and historical comparison; and the style of thinking that the Center encouraged subsequently migrated to many areas of world history and many other institutions. Second, the fertility and innovativeness of his thinking was a constant source of influence for others, and he certainly stimulated new conceptual approaches to important problems in Chinese history. And finally, Chuck’s writings were prolific, assuring him of a wide sphere of influence. More than fifty books and more articles that one can reasonably count assured that his ideas would have wide currency.

There are several specific areas in Chinese history where Chuck’s intellectual DNA seems particularly evident. Take the emphasis on historical comparison that was so central to Chuck’s work and worldview. A particularly fertile development in China studies in the past two decades is a new approach to large-scale comparison – new ways of thinking about how to compare the large developments of Western Europe and China, with regard both to political institutions and economic development. R. Bin Wong’s China Transformed sets the table for Eurasian comparisons in a new way. He urges us to compare the large economic and political development processes of Europe and China, without the blinkers of the Eurocentric assumptions that previous generations of economic historians have carried. This is an approach that is highly consonant with Tilly’s appetite for comparison and for fresh thinking about the ways in which we characterize those alternative experiences. Significantly, Bin Wong was an undergraduate student and a Junior Fellow at the University of Michigan, and he was influenced by Chuck at a very early stage. Ken Pomeranz’s Great Divergence pursues a similar intellectual agenda. Pomeranz too is committed to providing new and more nuanced comparisons between Europe and China, and the breadth and subtlety of his analysis, and his facility in using categories of social theory to frame the narrative, are very reminiscent of Tilly’s thought.

This kind of comparative work across Eurasia is also at the heart of the work of historical demographers such as James Lee, Cameron Campbell, and Tommy Bengtsson. In Life under Pressure and later volumes the collaborative team of researchers involved in the Eurasian Population and Family History Project take the challenge of comparison very seriously, and attempt to identify patterns of fertility, mortality, and health across dozens of micro-communities across the expanse of Eurasia. This is a kind of historical research that incorporates several features that Tilly’s work highlights: careful quantitative analysis, attention to local details, comparison across different historical settings, and a rigorous effort to bring data and theory into one narrative. Significantly, James Lee too was a Junior Fellow at the University of Michigan and was affiliated with the Center during 1980 and 1981.

Or take the infusion of good social analysis and theory into detailed historical research in the hands of scholars such as Peter Perdue in China Marches West. Peter was among the graduate students in Chinese history in the 1970s who were most directly influenced by the idea that good historical research needs to be informed by good social science thinking – and Chuck Tilly was one of those thinkers who wielded great influence on this generation. Peter took a year’s leave from his Harvard Ph.D. program to study with Tilly at Michigan, and the influence is apparent. For example, Peter takes up Tilly’s theories about state formation in his own effort to place a theoretical framework around the fluid dynamics of Russia, Qing China, and the inner Asian polities in China Marches West. “Tilly’s model, then, although it does not focus on China or on frontiers, helps to orient our discussion toward the interplay of military and commercial forces during the time of Qing expansion. Military considerations were primary, but not exclusive, in defining the empire’s identity” (530). Peter’s emphasis on the contingency of the developments that he describes in Central Asia is very important, and is also very suggestive of Chuck’s way of looking at historical change. Tilly’s work served to provide new questions for Chinese historians and new conceptual frameworks within which to attempt to explain the large processes of change that they were analyzing. State-formation, taxation, military provisioning, and popular politics were themes and theories that Tilly’s work helped to frame within recent work in Chinese history.

And, of course, there is the vital area of peasant politics. Chuck helped to highlight the central role that contention and popular politics plays in world history, from the local to the national to the global. And he was consistently fascinated by the particular processes and repertoires through which discontent turned into coordinated collective action. These topics are centrally important in Chinese history – whether we are thinking of peasant rebellions in the Qing or of environment protests in China today. Elizabeth Perry was herself a participant in the contentious politics project involving Tilly, McAdam, Tarrow, Goldstone, Aminzade, Sewell, and others, and her sustained work on collective action and peasant politics both contributed to and drew upon many insights in this fertile collaboration. One fruit of this collaboration is the edited volume, Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, edited by Ronald Aminzade, Jack Goldstone, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth J. Perry, William H. Sewell, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly; the preface describes the origins and course of the collaborative project. Also relevant is her essay, "Collective Violence in China, 1880-1980: The State and Local Society," Theory and Society 13:3 (May 1984).



Kevin O’Brien’s brilliant formulations (often with Li Liangjiang) of new ways of thinking about “rightful resistance” in China today owe much to Tilly (and to James Scott, another fertile thinker in the social science arsenal). O’Brien and Li’s analysis in Rightful Resistance in Rural China also makes extensive use of the most recent turn in Tilly’s thinking about contention, his emphasis on the social mechanisms of contention. Other historians and sociologists who have focused on popular politics in China similarly show the influence of Tilly, either directly or indirectly.

When Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom consider the “political theater” of 1989 (“Acting Out Democracy” in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China), they think of Tilly’s concept of repertoires of contention (36). And later in the essay their effort to place the “theater” of 1989 in a comparative perspective and in the context of the institutions of civil society within which the contention took place is very consistent with Tilly’s framework and style of approach.

C. K. Lee is another genuinely gifted sociologist with a central interest in protest and mobilization (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt). She doesn’t refer frequently to Tilly, but the way that she lays out the problem seems to me to reflect many of the mental frameworks for analyzing contention that Chuck advanced throughout his career. What this seems to show is that the conceptual frameworks for how to think about contentious politics that Tilly constructed throughout his career have percolated through the China field, and that younger scholars are now pushing those ideas further in directions Chuck could not have anticipated but would have appreciated greatly.

I am sure that this thumbnail accounting leaves out important ways in which Tilly has influenced the China field. In fact, if Chuck himself had taken on this question – how did one thinker’s ideas spread their influence over several other fields of research? – I am sure he would have come up with a smart way of tracking and observing the influence. And of course the forms of influence that I have highlighted here do not detract at all from the originality and innovativeness of these scholars. But I think the central point is clear: Chuck Tilly established new ways of looking at the landscape of large social change; he posed a new set of questions about power, coercion, and contention in the give and take of human history-making; and he laid out an extensive vision of historical process that has been deeply influential on historians in every field. Chinese history faces a huge range of challenges, and innovative thinking about how to understand social change and social persistence is crucial. Chuck Tilly’s fertile sociological imagination has added much to this field, and has much still to offer.

Imperial Ways

This post is part of China Beat's on-going coverage and commentary on historian Jonathan Spence's lectures for this year's BBC Reith Lecture. In this installment, Daniel A. Bell, professor at Tsinghua University, responds to Spence's first lecture, titled "Confucian Ways."

By Daniel A. Bell

I am a big fan of Jonathan Spence’s works. His books bring to life some of the great and not-so-famous characters in Chinese history and they read like novels. When I was told that he had delivered a lecture on “Confucian Ways” for the BBC, I was very curious, and clicked on the link with great anticipation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to download the programme here in Beijing, but I did print out the transcript. That’s what I’ve just read.

The lecture was delivered at the British library, and the host Sue Lawley opens by noting that the library houses the oldest book in the world, printed in 868 AD in China. Professor Spence adds that he is pleased to start his lecture “in the British library with its immense holdings of Asian books and manuscripts.” How did the British library secure those books, I wonder? Surely the weren’t willingly handed over to British imperial forces. I live right next to the Yuanmingyuan here in Northwest Beijing, the Old Summer Palace that was burnt down in 1860 by rampaging British and French forces. The ruins are visited by Chinese tourists, who view them as a symbol of China’s “century of humilitiation” at the hands of foreign powers. Perhaps the books were taken from the Yuanmingyuan? Or maybe the Chinese handed them over in exchange for the opium that they were forced to buy from British merchants?

I somehow thought that such questions might be answered by one of the Western world’s most eminent historians of China. Why else bring up the fact that so many of China’s treasures are held in Britain? Seems to be rubbing salt in the wound. Imagine if, two centuries from now, China manages to buy (or steal) British national treasures, and then brags about it when a Chinese professor of British history gives a talk on John Locke at the national library in Beijing. How would the British feel?

The lecture itself was short and unsurprising (to me). Professor Spence says a bit about the revival of Confucianism in China and asks whether Confucius is becoming a replacement for Mao. He notes that much of the appeal of Confucius comes from the force of his personality: “his resonance – to me at least – comes from his lack of grandstanding, his constant awareness of his own shortcomings; his rejection of dogmatism; and his flashes of dry wit.” That’s all fine, but I was hoping to hear more about, say, the way Confucius differs from Socrates. Why is he so attached to ritual? Does he value empathy over truth?

As often happens, the philosophical values were distorted in practice, but Professor Spence goes on to suggest that state Confucianism was nothing but the history of oppression: “By the 12th century AD, something approximating a state Confucianism was in place and over time this came to encapsulate certain general truths that had not figured prominently in the original Analects. For example, now included under this broad definition of Confucian thought were hostility or the demeaning of women, a rigid and inflexible system of family hierarchies, contempt for trade and capital accumulation, support of extraordinarily harsh punishments, a slavish dedication to outmoded rituals of obedience and deference, and a pattern of sycophantic response to the demands of central imperial power.”

Not exactly what one would expect from a subtle historian of Professor Spence’s stature. Was there nothing good about Confucianism in practice? How could it last so long? Why are so many people in China now looking to history for inspiration? Perhaps they were doing some things better than Western societies at the time? And maybe we can learn something from Confucianism that actually challenges contemporary liberal-democratic ways, that allows for progress in Western societies? Why didn’t Professor Spence try to challenge an audience that supposedly prides itself on its tradition of critical thinking?

Most of the transcript actually consists of short questions by the Great and the Good of the British establishment, followed by Professor Spence’s answers. The word “LAUGHTER” is often capitalized in between speeches, though personally I didn’t get any of the jokes. Perhaps one had to be there.

The first question is by the London-based editor of the Financial Times Chinese language website. He asks what Confucius might say about making money and wealth, at which point we are told there was “LAUGHTER.” Perhaps people laughed because they think of the Chinese as money-grubbing materialists, unlike the civilized British. Seems a bit insensitive to laugh at people who are trying to make money in a society with 800 million farmers who live barely above the subsistence level. Not to mention the fact that the country is in the middle of dealing with an earthquake that killed over 80,000 people in one of China’s poorest regions. Again, though, I may have missed the joke.

To be fair, the journalist then goes on to ask what Confucius might say about the growing wealth gap. I thought this would have been a good opportunity for Professor Spence to explain in what way the Chinese state has long had an obligation to care for the poor – centuries before such care become a public concern in Western societies – and how such obligations may have Confucian roots. But all he says is that Confucius himself didn’t have a contempt for trade.

Another question was asked about The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminister, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. He notes that Pope Benedict called on the Chinese state to respect authentic religious freedom and how the current leadership in China might use Confucianism to respect such freedom. Professor Spence responds that it’s difficult, again followed by inexplicable LAUGHTER. Then there’s a discussion about how many million Catholics there are in China and whether the Chinese government will invite the Pope to the Olympics, with both Cardinal O’Connor and Professor Spence saying that the Pope should be encouraged to go, again, with more LAUGHTER.

Then somebody from Amnesty International asks how the revival of Confucianism might impact acceptance of the “international” idea of “universality” of human rights. I thought Professor Spence might say something about how Confucian values might enrich the human rights debate with its own contributions thus making the human rights regime truly international, or perhaps how Confucians might prioritize rights differently and rely on informal norms and rituals rather than legal punishments to implement the sorts of values people care about. But nothing of the sort.

The moderator then notes that she would “love to hear if there are any Chinese voices out there anywhere”, but instead she takes a question from The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams. Seems a little too transparent that leading religious figures in the UK – obviously worried by the decline of religion in their own society – are looking to China as the next big market.

Then there’s a question about the editor of an Index on Censorship about whether Confucianism will just exchange “one form of authoritarianism for another.” Professor Spence responds reassuringly that Confucius was conscious of the dangers of speaking out, but he doesn’t say anything about how Confucius’s emphasis on moral exemplars and appeals to people’s better nature might actually lead to something different than the free market media model with its tendency to titillating and negative news reporting.

That’s followed by the BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson who notes that the Chinese authorities seem nervous about demonstrations in Tibet “which for a Western country would be pretty minor actually.” I expected Professor Spence to respond that Western countries may not treat as minor ethnic riots that kill many innocent civilians and burn down whole neighborhoods, but he just responds that it’s hard to answer such questions, followed by LAUGHTER. Professor Spence then goes on to note that the Chinese government seemed totally incompetent during the New Year holiday snowstorms (actually, that’s when Premier Wen Jiabao first established himself as the empathetic carer for the nation’s suffering victims) and he speculates about how it reminded him of times in Chinese history when such disasters had nearly brought down the government. The moderator then concludes the session, apparently having forgotten about the need to call on Chinese voices. I put down the transcript, almost ready to inquire about procedures for joining the Chinese Communist Party.

Why am I upset, I wonder? As mentioned, I’m actually a big fan of Spence’s works. Perhaps nuances are lost by relying on a transcript of a lecture. Maybe I’m importing my own views more than I should. Or could it be that the whole thing was satire, in the best British tradition of dry and biting humour?

Daniel A. Bell is professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tsinghua University. His latest book is China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton University Press, 2008).