5 Good Short Reads on China Beat Topics--All by People Who Aren't China Specialists

Academics focusing on China, like other area specialists, tend to place a high value on formal training in the language and culture of the place we’ve devoted ourselves to teaching and writing about. We think (and I’m no exception) that most of the best scholarly work on Chinese issues has been done by people with this kind of training. And the people outside of the academy that we pay the closest attention to—journalists, free-lance writers, business commentators, policy analysts, etc.—tend to be those who have had some training in Chinese studies, or know the language and have demonstrated a primary interest in China. This is an understandable position. And it is likely, and I believe defensible, that most of the publications on China to which contributors to this blog will draw attention (positive attention, at least--what we pan may be another story) will end up being by people who fall into the categories just described.

Still, there’s always a danger of a guild mentality setting in. So, it is important for us to acknowledge from time to time just how valuable a different sort of perspective can be, whether it is offered by Chinese writers who are not China specialists or by non-Chinese scholars and journalists who have a recent or just passing interest in Chinese topics. Sometimes a journalist just posted to China, without much background on the place, will come up with fresh insights, noticing something to which others were blind. And within the world of scholarship, I can think of several people based outside of Chinese studies who have made major contributions to topics that interest when they’ve turned their attention, even if briefly, to China. Judith Stacey’s work on gender in China, Saskia Sassen and John Logan’s comments on Chinese cities, and Barrington Moore and Eric Wolf’s studies of comparative revolutions—these are just a few “outsiders” with insights who come to mind.

This explains the reason for the list below, which points readers to five worthy short works by non-China specialists who have contributed to debates on fairly recent (I go back as far as an insightful eyewitness account of Tiananmen by a sociologist, Craig Calhoun, who admitted at the time to having a very limited knowledge of Chinese) topics within the purview of China Beat. Some have a serious ongoing interest in China (manifested in going there regularly, writing more than occasionally about, in one or two cases even taking lessons in the language), but part of what they bring to the subject that is useful is an immersion in the history and present dilemmas of other parts of the world.

The people I’ve chosen are a widely varied lot: Calhoun and also Perry Anderson straddle the line between sociology and history, Amartya Sen’s a philosophically minded economist, Andrew Ross is a specialist in cultural studies, and Pankaj Mishra is best known as a novelist and author of thoughtful pieces of travel writing and reportage. And the sample publications I provide links to below are about disparate subjects, from the Tiananmen protests (Calhoun), to Shanghai as a center for outsourcing (Ross), to the concept of “Asian Values” (Sen), to China’s “New Left” (Pankaj Mishra), to Taiwan elections (Anderson).

One thing they have in common for me is that each is someone whose writings on topics unrelated to Chinese affairs I had already read—and appreciated—before I came to the works listed below. Two have whole books devoted to China that are definitely worth reading (Calhoun and Ross), while the other three have excellent books that include chapters on Chinese themes—if, that is, these samples leave anyone wanting more.

The list (to which I hope followers of this blog will add by sending in a comment with a link to a favorite in this category) is provided below. When you click on each name, you’ll be taken to a complete short article from a political magazine or literary review, except in the case of Ross—with him (because the best comparable thing by him was a "for subscribers only" contribution to the Nation), you’ll be taken to an online excerpt from his latest book:

1. Craig Calhoun
2. Andrew Ross
3. Amartya Sen
4. Pankaj Mishra
5. Perry Anderson

Taelspin for Sunday, January 20, 2008

Taelspin will glean the best of the China blogosphere for your reading enjoyment. Suggestions and comments on blogs or posts we missed are always greatly appreciated.

This has been rumored for awhile here in Beijing, but the Angry Chinese Blogger gives the lowdown on the decision by some of the top Olympic teams to avoid staying in Beijing during the games. Reportedly, teams from Europe and America are making arrangements to stay and train in (and this is sure to be particularly galling to the Chinese) Japan out of concerns for pollution, food safety, and other issues. No idea how many teams are considering such an arrangement and, needless to say, Beijing authorities and BOCOG have kept mum on these developments. If it turns out to be a trend, it could be a real blow to Beijing's self-esteem and, as ACB reports, official reaction could offer an indication of how authorities will handle other 'embarrassing' stories in the domestic press during the Olympics.

Moreover, it will not only be the games that will come under scrutiny in 2008, and the same officials may find the foreign press corps more difficult to control than the homegrown variety. The Foreign Ministry has said, doth too much a wag might suggest, that foreign journalists will have unprecedented freedom to report on China this summer. Anecdotal evidence (Mrs. Jenne works for the Beijing bureau of an American newspaper) suggests that many officials, especially those in local areas, haven't gotten the memo. But as the Olympics approach, Chinese officials struggle with how to handle foreign criticism of long standing problems (pollution, human rights, etc.) as well as the inevitable PR snafus that arise whenever an event of the magnitude of the Olympics is held. The most common response so far to negative reports in the foreign media has been to whine about how foreigners don't/can't understand China. Cam at the Zhongnanhai blog says that learning how to take criticism is essential if China is serious about improving its image around the world. As Cam astutely notes, a Falun Gong protester on camera is embarrassing for the Chinese government, but video of the Chinese police, not known for their restraint, beating the guy before hauling him away would be catastrophic for China's PR campaign. That scenario would probably mean the ballgame in terms of China's new image, thank you for playing, and all the Fuwa you could muster likely wouldn't be enough to fix it.

Citizen journalism also presents a challenge to the CCP spinmasters. Via Global Voices Online, Chinese blogger Lao Humiao has published a series of reports on Beijing's homeless population, who are living in desperate poverty amidst the glitz and redevelopment of the Olympic City.

Why does China care so much about its image? Well, its part of a long history to try and achieve equivalency, as Yan Fu once wrote (via the late Benjamin Schwartz) it's about the search for 'wealth and power.' In the dark days of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, the struggle for national survival consumed Chinese intellectuals, many of whom were convinced that China's weakness would result in her passing into oblivion. Those fears still linger today. China is not in danger of disappearing, but presenting an image of a unified, strong, and confident nation is still seen by many in power as a priority of the highest order. One of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th century, and somebody whose ideas continue to resonate in contemporary China, was Liang Qichao. Dave of The Mutant Palm, has a beautiful post on Liang looking at the influence of Social Darwinism on Liang's thought and on the subsequent development of Chinese attitudes regarding race and the competition among nations.

Following a recipe: When Op-ed pieces on China go wrong

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is visiting Beijing and the Daily Telegraph has a dour op-ed piece written by Bruce Anderson in today’s edition. Anderson argues that China’s reemergence as a great power is not nearly as worrisome as the prospect of China’s failure.

“If China succeeds, there will be a price. The West would lose power. But Chinese success is much the lesser evil. Imagine what would happen if that huge and powerfully armed nation became a failed state.”

Fair as it goes. China is a large, powerful, and nuclear-armed nation. A collapse of the Chinese state would likely lead to international and humanitarian crises of unknown proportions. The nightmare scenarios include the possibility of rapid destabilization leading to chaos and fragmentation (“Afghanistan with missiles”) and/or the emergence of an ultra-nationalist ‘strongman’ willing to trade international stability or nuclear non-proliferation for regime concessions (“the DPRK on steroids.”) But worst case scenarios are not necessarily--in fact seldom are--the most likely possible outcomes of a given set of circumstances.

Should the above come to pass, it would indeed be troubling, but the deleterious side effects of an economically and militarily powerful authoritarian one-party state should still be on for consideration and Anderson does a fair job at outlining the challenges a rising China presents for the rest of the world.

But Anderson’s assessment of China’s internal problems is rather weak and in places veers dangerously close to substituting essentializing for argument. His analysis is also, unfortunately, somewhat typical of American and European op-ed writing on “The Rise of China.”

China is not a country at ease with itself. Apart from the inevitable strains associated with rapid growth and development, there are at least three others: anger, sex and fear.

Anger. Sex. Fear. These are things sure to titillate op-ed readers and attract fans of the “Jerry Springer Show.”

First, Anderson explains Chinese anger as being both a reaction to the humiliations of the past (true enough) and a result of Chinese racial superiority (where his argument careens off the tracks). An anecdote involving ancient Chinese tales of the origins of the Japanese race leads into an analysis of present-day Chinese resentment over Japan’s economic success.

Let's ignore, if we can for a moment, that the modern concept of race as Anderson seems to use it, had little, if anything, to do with the pre-20^th century Chinese worldview. When more contemporary ideas of race did appear, 20^th century Chinese intellectuals, influenced in large part by imported theories such as Social Darwinism, stressed the weakness of the Chinese race vis-à-vis the rest of the world. In China today, ideas of race are still frequently colored by Social Darwinism and conflated with perceptions of comparative national strength.

Contemporary nationalism in the PRC is also just as much the product of ‘patriotic education’ that emphasizes historical attacks on China’s sovereignty, the awesome importance of Chinese territorial integrity, and the unity of party/state/nation in the national consciousness. It is for this last reason that foreign media criticisms of the CCP, or historical arguments that suggest that, for example, Tibet wasn’t a full and willing part of China since time immemorial, are taken as direct attacks on the character of the Chinese people themselves.

So, let’s talk about sex, baby. (Did I just date myself with that song reference? I think I did. No matter. Press on.) In his piece, Anderson summarizes the Baby Boy Bomb argument: China’s One Child Policy will create a veritable army of pampered and spoiled male children in for a huge shock as they come of age and realize that some of them are going to be left out of the marriage pool.

Again, fair as it goes. It’s not a given, but if one wishes to destabilize a particular society, having a large group of underemployed young males with little hope of being able to enter into normative family relations is a good start. It was a factor in the rebellions of the late Qing and, for some, it’s a cause of concern in the Middle East today. It’s also going to be interesting to watch as the “Little Emperors” grow up with their every want and need catered to only to have the first people to ever tell them the word “no” turns out to be the CCP. As Anderson rightly notes, “it’s a fascinating sociological experiment unlikely to have a benign outcome."

The One Child Policy and its long-term effects are a favorite topic for western commentators on Chinese affairs. It's hard not to ignore a strong whiff of "exoticization for the post-modern age" in the West’s continuing fascination with the Chinese family planning regime. To be sure there have been and will continue to be negative consequences (infanticide, abortion for the purposes of sex selection, and increased trafficking in women to name but a few of the most horrific) but it is far from certain that the One Child Policy will have the kind of political or even international ramifications that some have suggested.

It's definitely worth watching, but there seems to be an assumption in the West that China is definitely heading for some sort of Male Malthusian Meltdown. Like many aspects of China's recent re-emergence, we really don't know, there just aren't any models by which to predic the outcome of this kind of large-scale social engineering.

Finally, we have fear itself, more specifically the Chinese government’s fear of its own people. Here Anderson makes the strong case that the CCP, stripped of much its ideological legitimacy, has resorted to essentially buying off the people in what Anderson, somewhat clumsily, terms an “econ-ocracy.” It’s true that the CCP has taken whole pages out of the Ronald Reagan playbook in recent years. (“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” “It’s morning again, in China.”)

Anderson warns, perhaps correctly, that this is only a short-term fix. Unfortunately, his argument for this seems to be based on the kind of ethnic characteristic analysis more typical of British journalism a century ago.

Anderson argues, “The Chinese are an individualistic race; they do not share the Japanese tendency to a group mentality.” Thus, he contends, the demand for individual rights will grow stronger and become an irresistible force for change.

I do think that the demand for individual rights is bound to grow in the coming decades but I think this has less to do with the Chinese as ‘a race,’ and more to do with urban Chinese as newly-enriched property owners seeking to preserve their gains over time and generations. Eventually, the choice will be have to be made by China’s emerging urban elite over which is the greater danger to the preservation of accumulated wealth: social instability (the bugaboo of ‘chaos’) or the unchecked power of the state in its myriad forms (official corruption, state appropriation of property, inadequate legal protections of property rights, etc.).

In the final balance, Anderson’s piece is not exceptionally bad, it’s bad on a rather depressingly ordinary and common level.

Too often op-ed pieces on China’s rise seem to be written by recipe: A couple of references to late-Qing history, a soupçon of Mao, a quirky anecdote from earlier historical annals and/or a Cultural Revolution reference (though some prefer the minty freshness of a Great Leap Forward pun), a dash of economic data on China trade, a smidgen of your favorite T-for-Trope: Tyrannical Tots, Taiwan, Tibet, or Tiananmen (to taste). Garnish, if wished, with a cab driver quote, picked up on the way to or from the Beijing airport, about how things were ‘better under Mao.’

Part of the goals of this space is to provide a corrective to the sort of “robot errors” that creep into reporting and writing on China and restore a proper sense that issues relating to China and the Chinese people are as complex and nuanced as those relating to any other large and diverse society. Boiler plate op-ed pieces simply aren't the answer. It's hard to fathom the editorial pages of the Telegraph trying to summarize all of Britain, past, present, and future, in 500 words. Why try to do it with China?

Why China's dollar pile has to shrink (relatively soon)

James Fallows has a piece in the February, 2008 Atlantic on what he calls “The $1.4 Trillion Question” – why China continues to accumulate $1 billion a day in relatively low-return American assets (mostly Treasury bills), why this can’t go on forever, and what it could mean if this pattern of investment ends abruptly rather than slowly. On the whole, it’s a good introduction, with some useful background on the people responsible for making the central government’s investment decisions. (The point that one of the two key figures, unlike his counterparts almost anywhere else, has never invested for himself, or even bought a house, is a nice touch.) I think the article overdoes its emphasis on a lack of transparency in China – the way in which sub-prime mortgages were re-packaged as “AAA” securities has made clear that the American financial markets China has been investing in aren’t always that transparent, either – but that’s a matter of tone and emphasis. What the article is missing, I think, are two important pieces of demographic and historical perspective, which help illustrate the pressures on the government. Fallows spends a fair amount of time on changes in China’s mood that may be real but are hard to get a handle on -- e.g. greater awareness among the population that their investments in the US are not earning much money (and some high profile ones have been outright losers, like the widely-publicized investment in the Blackstone Group) and that this is money that could be used to better things at home – and speculations about how much the government wants to, or can, continue resisting those popular desires in the interests of keeping inflation low, etc. I think the big story is more structural than that.

First the demography. Here the key point is one of the great under-played China stories : the rapid aging of the Chinese population. For roughly 30 years now, China has had compulsory birth control of various sorts, and (as most people reading this probably know) its birth rates declined at a rate that has very few historical parallels. So while the number of young people entering the work force every year has remained quite high until recently (China had so many births in the 1950s and 1960s that even with them having relatively few children per couple when they grew up, birth rates per 1,000 population stayed high into the late 1980s), the percentage of children in the population became quite low. Meanwhile, because Chinese death rates were very high before the Revolution, and stayed pretty high into the mid-1960s, there were also relatively few old people. So what economists call the “dependency ratio” – the ratio of people in the labor force to people whom workers need to support – has been extremely favorable for China over the last couple of decades:it's now at about 2 workers per non-worker, versus about 1:1 for the U.S. But that is now changing pretty quickly (thanks mostly to public health improvements under Mao)and China will soon have a fairly old population; by 2030, it will have as high a percentage of old people as countries like Italy and Germany today, whose pension problems, etc., you read about periodically. [Some of the best work on this is by my UC Irvine colleague Wang Feng and Andrew Mason at the University of Hawaii – their paper in a newly published Cambridge Press book – China’s Great Economic Transformation, edited by Loren Brandt and Thomas Rawski, is well worth a look, though the book won't be available for a couple more months.] China's dependency ratio will probably reach today's global average by 2020, and the current U.S. level of 1:1 by 2030.

A country with a higher ratio of dependents to workers –like a family in similar circumstances -- simply cannot save at the same rate as a country with relatively few dependents, no matter what the government may want to do and how many provisions it has to siphon the dollars China’s exports earn out of the economy and into a massive national savings account. And since China also has plenty of investment needs , as Fallows emphasizes – for schools, hospitals, sewers, you name it – it is likely to start spending down its dollar hoard before too long, no matter what happens in US-Chinese negotiations. Its true that both sides recognize the dangers of this happening too fast – leading to a run on the dollar and the collapse of China’s biggest market –but the pressures for it to at least start happening soon are even stronger than Fallows lets on.

That brings us to the history. China, like Japan and Taiwan before it, differs from Europe and the US in having undergone very substantial industrialization before its countryside began to empty out. (Japan’s rural population kept rising in absolute terms until World War II; China’s until roughly 1998.) Thus they were quite industrial before they were heavily urban, in part because they had lots of industry in the countryside. (Think of China’s Township and Village Enterprises.) Even today, China has a lower percentage of its population in cities than Britain had in 1840. There are all sorts of reasons for this – and anyone who becomes a loyal reader of my posts will eventually hear about them ad nauseam; but it is likely that in China, as in Japan, this will end with a period of extremely rapid urbanization. This rapid urbanization is now really getting underway (you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!), as rural industrial job creation slows to a crawl (as it now has) and the rural urban income gap becomes so large that even with many barriers to migration remaining, many more people will pick up and leave. So far, China’s urbanization rate pretty closely tracks Japan’s, with a 50 year lag – and beginning in the mid-1950s, Japan went from about 35% urban to about 70% urban in less than 20 years. Most people think China is poised to do the same – which will require China’s cities to grow by roughly the total population of the US and Mexico combined by 2030.

And here’s the rub. The Chinese government has worked very hard to avoid creating the kinds of slums that ring Mexico City, Manila, Cairo, etc . In fact, this has been one of the few real continuities in policy between pre- and post-1978, though the tools used to insure this -- outright prohibition of migration, guaranteeing land allocations, encouragement of rural industry, phasing out land taxes, various local policies that deny rural migrants access to urban services, etc. – have been an ever-changing mix. To a great extent they’ve been successful in meeting this goal: certainly there are grim communities in Chinese cities, but the numbers of people lacking access to electricity hook-ups, running water (of whatever quality), etc., is quite low by “third world” standards. This matters, among other things, for social and political stability. Maintaining this record as urbanization accelerates will require huge amounts of investment.

Meanwhile, even though the number of new job-seekers entering the labor force each year is now declining, China can’t really afford to see job creation slow down, because there is still a lot of labor to be absorbed. To go back to the Japan comparison, when Japan’s phase of very rapid urbanization began in the 1950s, its unemployment rate was around 2%, so even though people newly arrived in the cities faced crowding and other ills, they all had jobs. Nobody knows for sure what China’s urban unemployment rate is, but 15% seems like a plausible ball-park estimate. So job growth has to keep going, and presumably, most of that growth has to be making things and providing services for people in China. And that means a lot of the money now abroad has to come home – no matter how much, or little, resentment grows over China subsidizing U.S. over-consumption, or American backlash against Chinese ownership of U.S. assets. Nonetheless, Fallows has the main point right -- whether this happens smoothly or abruptly, and on what timetable, has enormous implications.

Self-Promotion Saturday: China's Brave New World

My latest book—and my first that is virtually free of footnotes, includes lots of first-person anecdotes, and has some chapters that combine equal parts historically informed analysis and playful musings—went into production a year ago. At the time, I didn't realize quite how much of a "best of times, worst of times" year 2007 would turn out to be for the appearance of a work like China's Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times, which strives to offer an alternately serious and whimsical look at ways the PRC and the world at large have been changing.

On the plus side, general interest in China, already on the rise, grew even greater over the course of 2007. On the negative side, this interest sometimes took forms (including dreams of striking it rich by investing in a new market and fears of a menacing rising power) that led people to seek in books simple answers to complex China questions, and mine refuses to offer a simple thumbs up or thumbs down assessment.

On the plus side, the newsworthiness of China made it more likely than it might have been in another year that radio show hosts would interview me about the book. On the negative side, due to budget cut-backs, 2007 saw many American newspapers dramatically reduce the number of reviews of books of any kind they ran.

On the plus side, more and more foreigners took or began planning trips to the PRC, which was good for a book, like mine, that might be considered agreeable airplane reading (and that even got a plug from an in-flight magazine). On the negative side, it wasn't as though PRC-bound travelers were limited in their options, as 2007 saw a lot of interesting books appear and saw at least two very notable ones—Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones and John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons—make it into paperback. (And to compound this problem, I published a couple of pieces—one at Outlook India, reprinted here by History News Network, and another for Campaign for the American Reader—that drew attention to the quality of works that could be thought of as "the competition," though in a way that admittedly encouraged readers to also keep my own work in mind.)

What kind of year will 2008 be for China's Brave New World, in terms of its ability to find a comfortable niche in the curious and often hard to understand (particularly perhaps for an academic) world of trade publishing? Frankly, I have no idea.

I do enter the new year, though, with some ideas about things I will do differently the next time around. I have thoughts, that is, about strategies to try to make sure that my next book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (a work that is eagerly awaited—at least by me and my wonderful and patient series editor, Mark Selden, and publisher, Routledge—and finally near completion), comes to the attention of lots of those “elusive general educated readers” for which it too will be intended. (Though as I think is indicated by my recent short publications on Shanghai’s past and present that try out ideas to be showcased in that book—such as one in The Nation and another in The Globalist—that work also will not offer simple answers to complex China questions.)

And, where China’s Brave New World is concerned, I'm upbeat about one aspect of the way 2008 is starting, namely with the appearance of two urls that allow curious readers to listen to me read aloud from two of my favorite chapters, "Mr. Mao Ringtone" and "All the Coffee in China," and then decide whether they want to buy the book (published from the start in paperback, incidentally), check it out from the library, or, if they teach courses on globalization or modern Chinese history and are looking for a "dessert course" reading to wrap up a class, even assign it to their students.

Frivolous Friday

Rachel DeWoskin's Babes in Beijing is only one example of an increasingly frank discussion over the past few years of the experiences of foreign women in China. Anna Sophie Loewenberg, a journalist and filmmaker, has been making videos about her life in China (with particular focus on love) for the past year or so under the title Sexy Beijing. You can find more, including contemporary news briefs, at the Sexy Beijing YouTube page or homepage.



The popular American television show, America's Next Top Model (hosted by Tyra Banks), took its final episodes to Shanghai and then Beijing last fall. Below, the would-be models' reactions to "fashion capital" Shanghai; the complete episode (and the follow-up episodes in Beijing) are available at YouTube (just click on the video itself to follow the link to YouTube).

Our Daily Reads: Best Of China Blogs

The contributors at The China Beat read a lot of China blogs. Here is a primer of a few of our collective favorites. We welcome you to add your own must-reads (or plug your own blog) in the comments section.

Best One-Stop Source of Information: China Digital Times
Best Media Blog: A tie between Danwei and China Media Project
Best Industry Blog: China Law Blog
Best News Blog: Beijing Newspeak – Written by Chris O’Brien, a language polisher/rewrite artist for Xinhua, a fascinating and frequently hilarious look behind the scenes of Chinese media.
Best Issue Blog: China Dialogue: Chinese and English articles on environmental and human rights issues.
Best Translation Blog: EastSouthWestNorth: A daily stop for most bloggers and journos in China; collects and translates a selection from China’s media and blogosphere.
Best Journalist Blog: This one is a toss-up between China Rises and Richard Spencer.
Best PR Blog: Imagethief, fabulously written blog by Will Moss, a PR professional in Beijing.
Best Personal Blog: Life in Suzhou. A fixture in the China blogosphere for a long time, this blog’s author still brings a fresh and unique perspective to his daily observations of life. Another strong one, with anecdotes from a working journalist, is Spot-On by Jonathan Ansfield.
Best Regional Blog: Opposite Side of China: Absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in Xinjiang and central Asia.
Best Taiwan Blog: Michael Turton’s The View from Taiwan.

In Case You Missed It: They Chose China

In the opening scenes of Shuibo Wang’s 2005 documentary, “They Chose China,” American soldiers dressed in the long, padded winter coats of the Chinese military cluster around a microphone to explain the international threat posed by McCarthy’s witch hunts and U.S. intolerance for freedom and democracy. The documentary tells the story of these twenty-one American soldiers, held as POWs by the Chinese during the Korean War, who refused repatriation after the 1953 armistice.

Through a mix of archival footage, Chinese and American TV clips, and contemporary interviews with one of the few surviving defectors, Wang tries to unearth why the young men chose to stay in China, attend university, and work as factory workers, farmers, truck drivers, and government propagandists. All but one of the men returned to the U.S. prior to the Cultural Revolution. (The one who stayed, James Veneris, lived out his life as a factory worker in Shandong, his fellow workers protecting him from persecution during the Cultural Revolution.)

Wang attempts to counter the argument that the men had been brainwashed by the Communist government (these soldiers were among the first tangible cases in U.S. media of the “brainwashing” phenomenon), instead presenting the men as “dissidents.” However, it becomes clear over the course of the movie that each of the men made the choice to stay for different reasons. Clarence Adams, a black soldier from Memphis, speaks of escaping from the racial discrimination and inequality in the United States, others seemed excited about the adventure of living in China, and others appear to have truly committed to socialism, maintaining their political beliefs even after returning to the U.S.

China buffs will find most interesting the footage Wang dug up from the POW camps—including film of the camp-wide “Olympic Games” prisoners organized—and clips of the soldiers explaining why they chose to stay in China. The film is rather hard to track down in the U.S. unless your local university or public library has a copy; it is not currently available through either Netflix or Blockbuster.

Five Good Short Books on China: A Guide for Readers with Limited Attention Spans

This list is for an imaginary couple who are about to take their first trip to China and have made it clear to me that they only have a limited amount of time to spend reading up on the country in advance. Or, perhaps better yet, they’ve been honest enough to tell me that they won’t start to read up on China until their plane actually takes off, and they want some ideas of what to cram into the limited space of their carry-on bags. Though busy, these imaginary friends (I do have real ones, but none that have asked me to do precisely this) are intellectually curious, so they want to be exposed to varied aspects of China, and while mostly concerned with the present and very recent past, they are willing to go back about a century in time on the page.

Here’s the list I’ve prepared for them (with a bit of explanation—also kept short for this era of limited attention spans):

1. The True Story of Ah Q
China’s greatest modern writer (Lu Xun), telling a dark but also comic tale linked to a major event in Chinese modern history (the 1911 Revolution) in only 68 pages. Need I say more?

2. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie’s elegantly written 176 page coming-of-age tale set during the Cultural Revolution.

3. The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Family
A stylish piece of illuminating ethnographic writing by Margery Wolf; provides many insights into kinship and gender in a mere 147 pages.

4. Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents
A bit long for this list, coming in at 272 pages, but editor Timothy Cheek manages to put a lot of important material into this slim paperback, including samples of Mao’s own writings and some scholarly takes on the Chairman (full disclosure: one of the scholars is named Wasserstrom), plus provide a quick tour of Chinese history from 1893 through 1976 (the years of his subject’s life)—and he nicely steers clear of either demonizing or romanticizing the Chinese leader.

5. The State of China Atlas
Cultural studies specialist Stephanie Donald and political scientist Robert Benewick’s map-filled and graph-packed overview of a wide range of features of contemporary Chinese society—a nice 128 page primer on what’s been going on in the PRC since Mao’s death.

After the Avalanche

Most Taiwan observers expected a convincing KMT victory in last Saturday's Legislative Yuan elections, perhaps even a landslide. What we got was an avalanche, with the KMT garnering 81 of 113 seats (71.68%), as opposed to a paltry 27 for the DPP. The scale of the rout was unprecedented, especially since the KMT ended up with just over 51% of the popular vote, as opposed to approximately 37% for the DPP, numbers that do not differ that dramatically from those of past elections.

A wide range of factors contributed to the DPP debacle, including profound concerns with the slow pace of Taiwan's economic growth and disappointment over corruption charges swirling around President Chen Shui-bian, his family members, and close associates, all of which appear to have contributed to a "throw the bums out" mentality. Structurally, the impact of the new single-district two-vote electoral system clearly favored the KMT by playing to its traditional strength of mobilizing voters at the grass-roots level. This election also seems to have sounded the death-knell for smaller parties that had not already rejoined the KMT, and signaled the continuing failure of Taiwan's referendum system (this election's referendums focused on anti-corruption and KMT party assets), particularly in terms of attracting enough voters (turnout barely exceeded 26% for each referendum).

All eyes now turn to the presidential elections, which are only two months away. Each candidate faces his own set of challenges. Ma Ying-jeou will need to avoid overconfidence and in-fighting among party leaders jockeying for position in the presidential administration he now seems poised to win, while also persuading the KMT leadership to use its overwhelming majority in the new legislature to enact measures that address the social and economic issues on the minds of most voters. In addition, he must convince the electorate that he will do his utmost to protect Taiwan's sovereignty in any negotiations with China. For Frank Hsieh, the primary challenges will be to rally demoralized and disillusioned party members, overcome factional infighting, and emerge from Chen's shadow as a viable candidate who can appeal to party faithful and independents. Both candidates will have to use the next few weeks to present their own visions for Taiwan's future.

In terms of Cross-Straits relations, this election has convincingly demonstrated that the economy matters far more to most voters than political or ideological issues. Therefore, it seems reasonable to expect that the winner of March's presidential election will make a concerted effort to improve Taiwan's relationship with China, regardless of who is actually elected. If this is indeed the case, then it will be China's task to tone down its rhetoric, remove some (if not all) of the hundreds of missiles pointing at Taiwan, and stress that China will respect Taiwanese culture, including this nation's impressive democratic achievements.

Anniversaries: The Rise and Fall of Wang Mang

We subscribe to an online encyclopedia to help one of my sons with homework, and because I placed the order, their “This Day in History” feature comes to my inbox. China rarely figures, which isn’t that surprising. After all, they need brief, punchy items that will catch readers’ attention, and that means items familiar enough to a general audience that a five word title is understandable, and that only three sentences are needed to remind us of what happened and why we should care. So I’m not crusading for “1644: Manchus enter Beijing with the help of Wu Sangui” to replace D-Day as the entry for June 6.

Still, anniversaries are good hooks for thinking about how history matters, and Chinese history has plenty of them. From that perspective, starting a blog in 2008 is less than ideal, because so many of the familiar modern anniversaries end in “9,” not “8”: the May 4th movement (1919), the founding of the P.R.C. (1949), Tiananmen (1989). Over the course of this year, I’ll be ruminating on a bunch of the “8” anniversaries, including some that may seem pretty obscure. The obvious ones are recent --The Great Leap Forward begins in 1958, Deng Xiaoping solidifies his power and launches his reforms in 1978, Disney releases Mulan in 1998 (OK, they may not all be world-historical events) – but I like the challenge of starting way back, especially since it’s not the period I research. So to begin with…

8 C.E. (2,000 years ago): Wang Mang usurps the throne, bans slavery, and institutes radical land reform – but still falls to peasant rebels.

The background to this is some horribly complicated court politics, but Wang Mang (45 BCE-23CE) was an official from a very elite family that had inter-married with the imperial lineage; the emperor Chengdi, who came to the throne in 32 BCE, was his first cousin. Chengdi was not much interested in governing and a succession of regents did so in his stead; Wang Mang was appointed regent in 8 BCE. The emperor then died without an heir two years later. Wang was up and down during political struggles over the next 15 years, but by 6 CE he had installed his daughter as empress, a one-year old as emperor and himself as regent and “acting emperor.” Two years later, after an intensive propaganda campaign that included the appearance of many engineered “portents,” considerable pressure mounted for him to assume the throne; after demurring a few times over the course of 8 C.E. (increasing his reputation for Confucian virtue) he finally accepted. He proclaimed that the Han had lost the mandate of heaven, and proclaimed himself first emperor of the Xin 新 (“New”) Dynasty on January 10, 9 C.E. (OK, it didn’t all happen in the year 8.)

Essentially all our knowledge of Wang Mang comes from one very hostile source -- the historian Ban Gu (32-92 CE), who also served as an official under the restored Han regime that followed Wang Mang’s fall. Even so, the record indicates that Wang Mang was genuinely popular during his rise to power, in part because he was not personally corrupt and seemed content with (by the standards of the elite of the time) relatively modest amounts of wealth and honor. Ban Gu tells us that in 4.C.E, almost half a million people – in an empire with 60 million far flung and mostly illiterate people – petitioned the throne to grant him high honors, which he refused.

Wang Mang took the throne in very troubled times, marked particularly by the increasing concentration of land-ownership, and an increase in the number of landless people who were enslaved. Seeking solutions, he was inspired by what were called the Old Texts – writings in an ancient script that had been found about 150 years before, during renovations at Confucius’s ancestral home. If genuine – as Wang Mang believed them to be -- these texts were significantly older than the other Confucian classics; among other things, they described the institutions of an era of perfect government under the ancient Duke of Zhou, Confucius’ hero. Taking those institutions as a goal to strive towards (while acknowledging that perfect recovery was unlikely), Wang Mang tried to “reinstate” a system where public land would be distributed to families in equal and inalienable squares; he also banned slavery (except for people condemned to be slaves of the state as a punishment for crimes). Both of these measures were widely flouted by elites and had to be repealed within a few years, but probably benefited a fair number of commoners, anyway. A series of currency reforms – designed to raise government revenue, but also to restore the precise coin shapes allegedly used in the early Zhou period – ended in failure and angered elites; however, it is not clear how much it mattered to most of the people in what was not a very monetized economy. Meanwhile, lest the land and slavery measures make him seem a committed “progressive” -- in fact, the twentieth century scholar and diplomat Hu Shi (1891-1962) called him China’s “first socialist” — he also made a large number of government offices that had previously been appointed by merit hereditary, because he believed that that, too, conformed to the early Zhou golden age described in the Old Texts.

Last but by no means least, Wang Mang insisted on returning as much as possible to the official titles of the Zhou era; this involved revoking quite a few honorary designations, including one that had been made the ruler of the Xiongnu tribal confederation (sometimes referred to as “Huns”) across the Northern border the symbolic equal of the Emperor. This and other failures of diplomacy led to war with the Xiongnu – and though Chinese forces more or less held the line, the financial strain of these wars was enormous.

As if all this wasn’t enough, Wang Mang had the bad luck to preside over atrocious weather, including punishing droughts in some places (including the capital area) and massive rains that led to huge breaks in the Yellow River dikes. It seems, in fact, that this is what undid him – peasant rebellions broke out in precisely the places that flood refugees had moved to en masse. It was these peasant insurgents who toppled the regime and killed Wang Mang in 23 CE, though what was left of the Han imperial lineage (which, for obvious reasons, had never stopped opposing Wang Mang’s new dynasty) took advantage of the situation to place itself back in power, ruling almost 200 years more.

OK, who cares? Well, for one thing, we can see a number of the recurring patterns of Chinese history at work here. First, there’s the state-peasant-elite triangle, in which the central government, again and again over the centuries, tried to create and sustain an independent, small-holding peasantry that it could tax and/or conscript directly, without having to work through local magnates. This long-running dynamic stands in sharp contrast to any number of states that took it for granted until a much later date that they should work indirectly through elites, and would not have seen it as a problem that the more and more peasants were becoming tenants, slaves, or other kinds of dependents of the aristocracy. At the same time, we see the other side of that dynamic – that when the state could tax and draft peasants directly, they often pushed hard enough to drive the weaker ones into debt, and thus back into dependence on local elites. (One of Wang Mang’s more imaginative programs was for a state monopoly on lending, designed to prevent this – but that never really got off the ground.)

The rise and fall of Wang Mang also shows some interesting patterns in Chinese foreign policy, which one can see some signs of even today. The enormous importance of symbolism in foreign relations is hardly unique to East Asia, but it certainly stands out in this story, apparently triggering the Xiongnu revolt. Well before that, a number of the “portents” Wang Mang manufactured to show he was destined to rule involved foreigners (at his instigation) bringing exotic gifts which showed they recognized his virtue: a rhinoceros from what is now southern Vietnam, and a white pheasant from an independent kingdom in what is today Southwest China. What is striking here is that, unlike the Xiongnu, neither of these kingdoms was a military threat or any other kind of direct factor in Chinese affairs. It is not immediately obvious why the recognition of weak and distant parties should be particularly important in legitimizing the ruler of a great power, but it clearly was – and is, as anyone can attest who has watched Chinese newscasts and noted the prominence given to even strategically trivial foreign delegations. Introductory surveys of Chinese history often make much of how the “tribute system” of foreign relations – then its formative stages – enacted a Chinese sense of superiority to everyone else; but part of what that leaves out is that such a system also made it a necessity for ruling China that foreigners (and minorities within the empire, who also often offered “tribute”) recognized that China embodied that superiority, or at least were willing to act as if they did. (It leaves out a lot of other things, too, which will come up when we hit other dates.)

Also, the story of these years reminds us that there were always pragmatic exceptions to the idea that the Chinese emperor was a ruler without equal, responsible for “All Under Heaven.” Not only did many tributaries receive gifts that far exceeded the value of their tribute, so that economics quietly told a different story than ritual did about the balance of power, but ritual itself was flexible. One of the Xiongnu leaders had a seal that placed him on an equal rank to the Han Emperor and this was apparently no big deal (in other words, not a sign that the Chinese state was failing), until Wang Mang, in a burst of Confucian fundamentalism, took it away from him.

Finally, Wang Mang is interesting for the enormous investment so many people have had in interpreting and evaluating him: the Columbia political scientist C. Martin Wilbur once called him “the most controversial figure in Chinese history.” (Mao was still alive at the time, so maybe he didn’t yet count as “in history.”) His biography in the canonical History of the Han Dynasty treats him as a boundlessly ambitious master villain – it acknowledges that he was popular for quite some time, but attributes this entirely to patronage he dispensed, and to virtuous gestures that were completely hypocritical. This remained the majority view throughout the imperial period. On the other hand, Hu Shi was not alone, though he was unusually fulsome -- in seeing him as a visionary reformer who failed only because he was far ahead of this time, and one of the greatest statesmen in Chinese history. (And this is not a case of a modern radical looking for a forebear to praise – Hu Shi himself was firmly convinced that twentieth century China needed gradual, not radical, change, and threw in his lot, despite a number of qualms, with the Nationalists against the Communists.)

But what none of these commentators called him is what recent Western historians have insisted on calling him: a committed Confucian. For centuries it has been his departures from traditional policies – whether damned as cynical and dangerous or praised as humane and innovative – that have been salient. By contrast recent scholarship, both pro and con, emphasizes how he justified almost everything he did in terms of classical texts, insisted on trying to return to the world that those texts described, and made far fewer compromises with the institutions that had evolved since Confucius’ time than the rest of his contemporaries. (Despite Wang Mang’s fall, the Old Texts he championed became canonical thereafter, and remained central parts of Chinese intellectual life – if not literal blueprints for policy-making, until Qing scholars proved that they were hundreds of years newer than they claimed to be. By persuading generations of scholars that they had greater access to the classical age than they could otherwise have claimed, this shift had an enormous influence – but one I wouldn’t dare try to specify.) That Wang Mang insisted on citing the Old Texts as a guide to things ranging from the shapes of coins to the distribution of land to the proper titles to be conferred on foreign and domestic dignitaries leaps out at us in a way that it did not in the past, even for a Chinese scholar as committed to questioning “tradition” as Hu Shi. The difference undoubtedly says something about how much even iconoclastic scholars who began their careers within a Confucian world took for granted some degree of reliance on ancient models of government, even on the part of a radical who usurped the throne; but it also probably says something about how familiar we are with fundamentalist “solutions” to the problem of finding guidance for changing times.

On the China Beat

China has been looming ever larger in the global economy and the global imagination in recent years, and the international chatter about the country hit a crescendo last year with reports about things like lead paint, moon shots, an architectural face-lift in the capital in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games, high growth rates, a rising middle class, and ever sharper divides between haves and have-nots. As China draws more attention from the Western media and its readership, the need for storytellers and interpreters of China has also grown. As China scholars and writers who are concerned about the way Chinese stories are spun, both within and outside the Middle Kingdom, we formed this blog in order to draw attention to the tales and twists of China past and present.

Beginning in mid-January 2008, The China Beat will regularly publish commentaries, interviews, and other short pieces that deal with the PRC, the coverage of Chinese experiences in the Western media, and the place of China in Western popular culture. Between us, we bring to the task experience on the ground in China and following it from afar, researching varied topics relating to the country's past and present, and writing on Chinese themes in different genres. We differ in opinions and background, but share a commitment to convincing readers that China deserves to be seen as a complex country undergoing multifaceted transformations, not as an inscrutable place that defies understanding.