By this point, some of our readers may be wondering who the China Beat writers are, or rather wondering who is involved beside the few names that ring a bell. I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce everyone—briefly, since this is an accomplished group, and full introductions might run rather long.
As several commentators have already noted, we have a healthy contingent of contributors from the University of California, Irvine. UCI is my own home, and other Orange County-based contributors include Ken Pomeranz (who has produced ambitious works of comparative history, such as The Great Divergence, as well as co-authoring a popularly-focused book on the way commodities circulate across borders, The World That Trade Created), Jeff Wasserstrom (who tells me he is proudest at the moment of finally breaking into the in-flight magazine racket—since he loves the notion of a captive airborne audience), Nicole Barnes (who before arriving in Irvine was involved in the lively East Asia outreach program at the University of Colorado), and Yong Chen (who recently curated an exhibit of menus from American Chinese restaurants and continues to track the links between food and culture).
Our Southern California crew also includes Yan Yunxiang, whose anthropological looks at McDonald’s influence in China have garnered a great deal of attention. Two other anthropologists contributing to the blog are Robert Weller (who has worked on religion, civil society, popular unrest, and recently published a path-breaking book on environmental issues) and Susan Brownell (who, currently in Beijing to study the Olympics, brings to the table her first-hand experience as a gold medalist in the 1986 Chinese National College Games which was the basis for her first book, Training the Body for China).
Paul Katz, our Taiwan-based correspondent, has worked extensively on Chinese religion. His publications include a volume he co-edited that links that topic to the very topical subject of Taiwanese identities.
Some of our contributors have a great deal of practice with the web and media issues. Jeremiah Jenne keeps the popular blog, Jottings from the Granite Studio, while Tom Mullaney made forays into the blogosphere regularly last summer with entries, such as this one, on a Stanford site and is gearing up to try his hand at podcasts for China Beat. David Porter, who teaches comparative literature, is behind Clavis Sinica, and Tim Weston writes regularly on contemporary Chinese media and media coverage, as he did in China’s Transformations, and is currently researching the history of journalism in China.
We also have several contributors with backgrounds in journalism, travel writing, and/or reportage. Susie Jakes is the former Beijing correspondent for Time Magazine, Angilee Shah is the former editor of the UCLA online press review AsiaMedia, Leslie T. Chang worked for the Wall Street Journal in China and is the author of the forthcoming Factory Girls, and Peter Hessler is the author of the bestsellers Oracle Bones and River Town.
--Kate Merkel-Hess
China Beat editor
2/01/2008
Beijing Olympic FAQ #2: Will a Boycott Succeed?
FAQ#2: Will calls for a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games be successful?
I can say with some certainty that in the current geopolitical climate, calls for an Olympic boycott will be unsuccessful - though I suppose they make for good headlines. The advocacy groups who are calling for boycotts have no direct control over the organization of the Olympic Games. In order for a boycott to succeed, the organizations that would have to support it are
1) the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and/or
2) the 205 National Olympic Committees (NOCs for short) that are planning to send athletes to the Games – which would result from pressure from their national governments.
Some pundits raise the 1936 Berlin Olympics as an example of an Olympics that should have been boycotted. However, if you study the history of the IOC after those games, it appears that the "Hitler Games" actually strengthened the IOC's anti-boycott position. The American IOC member at that time, Ernst Lee Jahncke, supported an American boycott. Avery Brundage opposed the boycott and managed to achieve a supportive vote in the Amateur Athletic Union, which governed most Olympic sports at that time. Jahncke was expelled from the IOC and Brundage was co-opted to take his place. Brundage later became IOC president from 1952 to 1972 and is the only American to have held that position. He was not a sophisticated thinker, but he was pithy. It was he who popularized the phrases “keep politics out of sport” and “the Games must go on” (the latter was stated after the massacre of Israeli athletes in
The fact that today the 1936 Games are used as an argument in support of boycotting the Beijing Games shows that the outside world does not always see things the way the inner IOC circles do - so one might ask, is either side deluded? Or do they simply have differing agendas? Clearly they have different agendas. So what, ultimately, is the agenda of IOC members? Well, they are a varied lot, but they all have one thing in common – whatever benefits they get from being IOC members increase in times of peace, international cooperation, and expanded economic interdependency. They thus have a vested interest in interlinking the world through Olympic sports.
New IOC members are selected by the existing IOC members in a process called "co-optation." They are not representatives of their countries and are not appointed or elected by their country. They are co-opted because of their commitment to the Olympic Movement, a commitment that in theory should be idealistic but in practice may be pragmatic (or some combination of both). An example of a member co-opted for her idealistic commitment is the U.S. member, Anita DeFrantz, who was co-opted in 1986 after she had gained international attention by filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Olympic Committee over its boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, contesting its authority to prevent U.S. athletes from taking part in the Games. She lost, but she was identified by the IOC as someone whose commitment to the Olympic ideals superseded her commitment to following the orders of the
Most if not all IOC members have some kind of vested interest in assuring that the Games go on. One could be cynical about this – like the most outspoken Olympic critic in the
If one wants to credit IOC members with some idealism, one could observe that there's a general consensus among the current IOC membership that past boycotts were not effective in bringing about any political change, and all they did was to harm the athletes of the world. Athletes from non-participating countries lost their chance to take part; athletes from participating countries missed their rivals; global sports as a whole were damaged.
Another point is that currently less than half of IOC members are from Western Europe, North America,
The NOCs are required by the Olympic Charter (Fundamental Principle #4), to be politically independent from their national governments. Still, the NOCs would only boycott in reaction to pressure from their national governments, but in some countries they can defy their governments. This happened during the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics, when 7 governments boycotted but allowed NOCs to send athletes. So the question is whether the world's governments - or in particular the
Stay tuned for FAQ#3: Could
1/31/2008
Daily Reads—The Second Sequel: Five Global Sites with Good China Content
As the last in our trilogy (for now) of nods to internet resources we rely upon, we offer up five valuable sites that deal with globalization (some are exclusively devoted to that topic, others just have a lot about it). They are on our radar screen because each fairly regularly brings China into the picture in interesting ways. To illustrate this, as with the last list, we provide first a link to a homepage and then a link to a China story.
1. Yale Global
This site was founded and continues to be run by Nayan Chanda, whose credentials as a commentator on global issues are impeccable (born in India, educated in Paris, covered Vietnam as a journalist, and so on). But so, too, are his credentials as a China specialist, as he studied Sinology in France and worked in Hong Kong as editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. So, not surprisingly, he has run some very good pieces on China, such as Anita Chan and Jon Unger’s insightful recent commentary on lead paint and toys.
2. Salon
Andrew Leonard tracks globalization for Salon on this site. He often turns his attention to China, generally focusing on its role in contemporary global flows. But here’s an example, particularly relevant for China Beat readers, in which he moves between the global past and the global present via the subject of porcelain.
3. Foreign Policy
This is the blog of a magazine devoted to international issues, which a few years ago underwent a dramatic redesign (becoming a jazzier looking periodical) and also began paying increased attention to the cultural as well as economic and political aspects of globalization. The magazine itself has done a lot on China (including a cover story, cleverly titled “Chairman Yao,” on the country’s most famous basketball player). For a sense of how the blog handles the PRC, here’s a piece on mining disaster.
4. The Globalist
A daily online publication devoted to globalization, The Globalist features pieces by many different kinds of area experts and people looking at worldwide trends. Here’s a useful rundown on international investment and China by its editors.
5. World Changing
World Changing: Change Your Thinking is a site that, to be honest, we’ve just become aware of, but some of its postings relating to China have caught our attention. With a heavier emphasis on technologies of communication and the environment than the other sites, it also has something unusual for a globalization blog—a regular contributor based in China. She’s a freelance writer named Mara Hvistendahl and here is one of her postings on Chinese environmental issues.
1. Yale Global
This site was founded and continues to be run by Nayan Chanda, whose credentials as a commentator on global issues are impeccable (born in India, educated in Paris, covered Vietnam as a journalist, and so on). But so, too, are his credentials as a China specialist, as he studied Sinology in France and worked in Hong Kong as editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. So, not surprisingly, he has run some very good pieces on China, such as Anita Chan and Jon Unger’s insightful recent commentary on lead paint and toys.
2. Salon
Andrew Leonard tracks globalization for Salon on this site. He often turns his attention to China, generally focusing on its role in contemporary global flows. But here’s an example, particularly relevant for China Beat readers, in which he moves between the global past and the global present via the subject of porcelain.
3. Foreign Policy
This is the blog of a magazine devoted to international issues, which a few years ago underwent a dramatic redesign (becoming a jazzier looking periodical) and also began paying increased attention to the cultural as well as economic and political aspects of globalization. The magazine itself has done a lot on China (including a cover story, cleverly titled “Chairman Yao,” on the country’s most famous basketball player). For a sense of how the blog handles the PRC, here’s a piece on mining disaster.
4. The Globalist
A daily online publication devoted to globalization, The Globalist features pieces by many different kinds of area experts and people looking at worldwide trends. Here’s a useful rundown on international investment and China by its editors.
5. World Changing
World Changing: Change Your Thinking is a site that, to be honest, we’ve just become aware of, but some of its postings relating to China have caught our attention. With a heavier emphasis on technologies of communication and the environment than the other sites, it also has something unusual for a globalization blog—a regular contributor based in China. She’s a freelance writer named Mara Hvistendahl and here is one of her postings on Chinese environmental issues.
1/30/2008
China Annals: Interview with Ian Johnson
The China Beat will be posting periodic interviews with journalists who cover China in widely read newspapers and magazines in the US and UK. Our first interviewee is Ian Johnson, China journalist for the Wall Street Journal, and author of Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China. In 2001, Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of China.
1) What was the most intriguing, amusing, inspiring, or eye-opening story that you have covered in China?
I think the favorite story I covered was about farmers in northern Shaanxi who were filing class-action lawsuits against the authorities for overtaxing them. I had been aware of Chinese class-action lawsuits, at least from the 1990s when I read about them in China Quarterly. But I never thought that they would be used in such a poor area and, to some degree, to such effect. This is a really poor part of the country and yet people were aware of their rights and had banded together to try to protect them. In one particular case I wrote about, the farmers succeeded in reversing illegal fees. In another they didn't, but overall I think that such lawsuits had an effect. The government has since repealed most of these fees and the situation has improved a lot.
I remember one thing in particular—the farmers didn't realize what their tax rate was supposed to be until they saw it on the television news. This showed the transformative power of electricity and mass communications, which essentially bypassed corrupt local officials. And of course the local people were extremely hospitable. I had never thought that a cave could be so comfortable.
2) If you could convince academics to do more work related to a topic in Chinese history or contemporary China, what might that be?
It's hard to think of a topic that academics haven't sliced and diced, but what I think would be an excellent service would be more accessible macro-histories of certain topics that our Bildungsbürgertum [educated middle-class] could read to learn about China.
This is an old gripe and one that many academics share. What bothers me is that it's often hard to recommend one book in a certain field because most academic books are too specialized. Journalist books, by contrast, are often too perishable or too banal. So I think there's a lack of books that serious, educated non-specialists can pick up and read on various topics. (To clarify, I don't mean a book on just China, but even on something more specific, such as Chinese economic reforms or Chinese politics.)
I've read a lot of great books recently by academics but few that I could recommend, say, to my father. That's because they are loaded with jargon and even coin words or dredge words out of the depths of the OED to describe what essentially are very ordinary phenomena. This is a pity because all that great work ends up hitting a tiny fraction of the population. Again, I don't see an easy answer to this given the reward structures in academia, but it's something worth considering.
3) Are there certain questions that you get all the time as a journalist covering China that just irritate you? In other words, are you commonly confronted with certain stereotypes or misconceptions about China which endure despite your multiple attempts to dismantle them?
Well, besides whether Chinese really eat dogs or whatever, I'm bothered by questions that reflect an overall lack of understanding. As a journalist, the most sobering experience I have is when friends come to China and are astounded at how China doesn't fit their expectations. I think this is due to our failure in the media to convey China accurately.
One example is migration. If you believe most journalistic coverage, migration is a disaster, with exploited peasant girls getting sucked into Dickensian factories, the only escape from which is suicide or prostitution. This happens, but the bigger and more accurate story is one of urbanization, wealth creation, and empowerment. Young people with no future on the farm are going to factory towns to work and save money, which they send home or use on themselves. It's not all Horatio Alger, but the dominant storyline of victimization is plain wrong.
The problem is that readers lack the ability to contextualize. If an American reads about an exploited worker in the U.S., he or she knows that this is atypical; most factory workers don’t work in brutal sweatshops. If they read about it in a foreign country, they often make a reverse assumption: that it is representative. This is a logical assumption because we want to know about what's the big picture in foreign countries; we don't want to waste our time reading about a bunch of exceptions. Who can figure out what's exceptional if we don't know what's typical?
Journalists, meanwhile, are conditioned to report on the exceptional. You put the two together and readers are often misinformed. They think China is a polluted gulag on the verge of collapse. But when readers come here, they sense the dynamism and wonder how they got it so wrong.
4) What is the most exciting or rewarding aspect of working as a foreign correspondent?
Being able to barge into people's lives and nose around.
5) What first drew you to China, and how has your job changed your life in ways that you never imagined when you first began?
I got interested in China for two reasons: one, my father worked for Swire (a big Hong Kong conglomerate that owns, among other things, Cathay Pacific airlines) and had made some trips to the company headquarters. I think that piqued my interest. Maybe because of that I signed up for Chinese as a lark—I certainly never intended to study it. I had attended the University of Florida because it was an affordable, local state school and had a good journalism program. The university had a language requirement and I didn't want to learn another western language (I grew up in Montreal, so had French as a second language). A teacher posted a note somewhere saying he was looking for students to fill out his beginning Chinese section and so I thought this would be fun for a year. The teacher (Chauncey Chu) was an incredibly gifted and enthusiastic teacher. I fell in love with the language and changed my major after the second semester, and later continued my studies in Taiwan and Germany. So I have an academic to thank (and a linguist at that) for my engagement with China.
1) What was the most intriguing, amusing, inspiring, or eye-opening story that you have covered in China?
I think the favorite story I covered was about farmers in northern Shaanxi who were filing class-action lawsuits against the authorities for overtaxing them. I had been aware of Chinese class-action lawsuits, at least from the 1990s when I read about them in China Quarterly. But I never thought that they would be used in such a poor area and, to some degree, to such effect. This is a really poor part of the country and yet people were aware of their rights and had banded together to try to protect them. In one particular case I wrote about, the farmers succeeded in reversing illegal fees. In another they didn't, but overall I think that such lawsuits had an effect. The government has since repealed most of these fees and the situation has improved a lot.
I remember one thing in particular—the farmers didn't realize what their tax rate was supposed to be until they saw it on the television news. This showed the transformative power of electricity and mass communications, which essentially bypassed corrupt local officials. And of course the local people were extremely hospitable. I had never thought that a cave could be so comfortable.
2) If you could convince academics to do more work related to a topic in Chinese history or contemporary China, what might that be?
It's hard to think of a topic that academics haven't sliced and diced, but what I think would be an excellent service would be more accessible macro-histories of certain topics that our Bildungsbürgertum [educated middle-class] could read to learn about China.
This is an old gripe and one that many academics share. What bothers me is that it's often hard to recommend one book in a certain field because most academic books are too specialized. Journalist books, by contrast, are often too perishable or too banal. So I think there's a lack of books that serious, educated non-specialists can pick up and read on various topics. (To clarify, I don't mean a book on just China, but even on something more specific, such as Chinese economic reforms or Chinese politics.)
I've read a lot of great books recently by academics but few that I could recommend, say, to my father. That's because they are loaded with jargon and even coin words or dredge words out of the depths of the OED to describe what essentially are very ordinary phenomena. This is a pity because all that great work ends up hitting a tiny fraction of the population. Again, I don't see an easy answer to this given the reward structures in academia, but it's something worth considering.
3) Are there certain questions that you get all the time as a journalist covering China that just irritate you? In other words, are you commonly confronted with certain stereotypes or misconceptions about China which endure despite your multiple attempts to dismantle them?
Well, besides whether Chinese really eat dogs or whatever, I'm bothered by questions that reflect an overall lack of understanding. As a journalist, the most sobering experience I have is when friends come to China and are astounded at how China doesn't fit their expectations. I think this is due to our failure in the media to convey China accurately.
One example is migration. If you believe most journalistic coverage, migration is a disaster, with exploited peasant girls getting sucked into Dickensian factories, the only escape from which is suicide or prostitution. This happens, but the bigger and more accurate story is one of urbanization, wealth creation, and empowerment. Young people with no future on the farm are going to factory towns to work and save money, which they send home or use on themselves. It's not all Horatio Alger, but the dominant storyline of victimization is plain wrong.
The problem is that readers lack the ability to contextualize. If an American reads about an exploited worker in the U.S., he or she knows that this is atypical; most factory workers don’t work in brutal sweatshops. If they read about it in a foreign country, they often make a reverse assumption: that it is representative. This is a logical assumption because we want to know about what's the big picture in foreign countries; we don't want to waste our time reading about a bunch of exceptions. Who can figure out what's exceptional if we don't know what's typical?
Journalists, meanwhile, are conditioned to report on the exceptional. You put the two together and readers are often misinformed. They think China is a polluted gulag on the verge of collapse. But when readers come here, they sense the dynamism and wonder how they got it so wrong.
4) What is the most exciting or rewarding aspect of working as a foreign correspondent?
Being able to barge into people's lives and nose around.
5) What first drew you to China, and how has your job changed your life in ways that you never imagined when you first began?
I got interested in China for two reasons: one, my father worked for Swire (a big Hong Kong conglomerate that owns, among other things, Cathay Pacific airlines) and had made some trips to the company headquarters. I think that piqued my interest. Maybe because of that I signed up for Chinese as a lark—I certainly never intended to study it. I had attended the University of Florida because it was an affordable, local state school and had a good journalism program. The university had a language requirement and I didn't want to learn another western language (I grew up in Montreal, so had French as a second language). A teacher posted a note somewhere saying he was looking for students to fill out his beginning Chinese section and so I thought this would be fun for a year. The teacher (Chauncey Chu) was an incredibly gifted and enthusiastic teacher. I fell in love with the language and changed my major after the second semester, and later continued my studies in Taiwan and Germany. So I have an academic to thank (and a linguist at that) for my engagement with China.
1/28/2008
What Shall We Do with the Dead Dictator?
One of the thorniest problems facing fledgling democracies involves how to cope with memories of their former dictators. Attempts to assess this aspect of a country's history are especially problematic due to the fact that the trauma many citizens have suffered is tempered by the lingering impact of indoctrination and hero worship (consider the debates over Suharto's rule now that he has just passed away). Add to this mixture of emotions the spices of identity formation and electoral politics and its volatility can increase exponentially.
For the past year, Taiwan has been in the throes of grappling with the legacy of former ROC President Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). One aspect has involved a "rectification of names" (zhengming 正名) campaign (for example, renaming CKS International Airport as Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport), which also includes affixing the word "Taiwan" to as many state organizations as possible (a case in point being Taiwan Post). At the same time, government officials and scholars have been striving to achieve some degree of transitional justice (zhuanxing zhengyi 轉型正義) by holding Chiang and other former ROC leaders accountable for human rights abuses, especially the death and imprisonment of thousands of Taiwanese during the 228 Incident of 1947.
The debate over these issues reached a crescendo last month, when the government renamed and redesigned the sacred space of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (now National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall), while also withdrawing funding and the military honor guard from the Cihhu Presidential Burial Palace (Cihu qinling 慈湖陵寢) in Daxi (Dasi 大溪) where both the elder Chiang and his son, former President Chiang Ching-kuo (1910-1988), had been temporarily laid to rest. Both of these sites are powerful symbols of the presence the Chiang's continue to exert over Taiwan. The mammoth Memorial Hall, modeled after the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing yet also resembling an imperial palace, was constructed over a three and a half year period extending from 1976 to 1980, with the imposing bronze statue of Chiang weighing in as the fourth largest in the world. The Cihhu mausoleum was built on land originally belonging to the renowned Lin family of Banqiao (Panchiao 板橋), which was presented to the state in 1955 and used as a site for one of Chiang's residences since the summer of 1959.
Plans to rename the Memorial Hall were announced in May 2007, but the formal opening of the new site and the replacement of the renowned characters "Great Centrality and Perfect Uprightness" (dazhong zhizheng 大中至正) adorning the site's main gate with "Liberty Square" (Ziyou guangchang 自由廣場) did not take place until the end of the year. There had also been fears that Chiang's statue would be demolished or enclosed in an iron cage, but when the hall reopened on New Year's Day it was found to have been surrounded by kites and photographs commemorating Taiwan's arduous struggle towards democracy. Even these alterations caused considerable furor, especially after strongly worded statements in their favor by leading officials from the Ministry of Education and Government Information Office.
The government's decision to withdraw its support from the presidential mausoleum, which was made at the same time the Memorial Hall was being rectified, sparked a different set of rhetorical fireworks, especially when Chiang Fang Chih-yi 蔣方智怡 (Chiang Ching-kuo's third daughter-in-law) proposed having both Chiang's remains reburied in their native home of Fenghua 奉化, Zhejiang. President Chen Shuibian 陳水扁 immediately voiced his outrage, pointing out that the government had already spent NT$30 million (approx. US$925,000) in taxpayers' money to build permanent tombs for the former leaders at the Wuzhishan (Wuchishan 五指山) Military Cemetery in Xizhi (Hsi-chih 汐止; suburban Taipei). With elections for the Legislative Yuan fast approaching, the above issues became subjects of an increasingly acrimonious debate. One of the few voices of reason was none other than one of Chiang Kai-shek's descendents, Demos Chiang (蔣友柏), who posted thoughtful entries on his own blog pointing out that while his great-grandfather had been responsible for great suffering, he neither merited deification nor deserved demonization.
Now, with election fever (temporarily) subsiding, so has the controversy over the Chiang's legacy, although some have blamed the DPP's stunning defeat as being in part due to the clumsy way in which the government handled this issue. The transformation of the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall is largely complete, although its website still features the hall's former abbreviation. The mausoleum is now being managed by the Taoyuan County Government, while a new park in Daxi has been built to hold hundreds of discarded statues of Chiang Kai-shek. The wounds caused during his rule remain, but many still regard him as a great leader, and there is even some nostalgia for the rule of his son. However, the question of how to come to grips with this facet of Taiwan's modern history remains unanswered. While archives have been opened and studies published, the past has been politicized by both the DPP and the KMT, and Taiwan's sole "Truth Commission" was created by the pan-Blue camp merely to investigate the shooting of Chen Shuibian and Lu Hsiu-lien 呂秀蓮 prior to the 2004 election. However, while both democracies and dictatorships attempt to manipulate the past to serve the present, Taiwan deserves credit for allowing such topics to be the subject of free and freewheeling discussion.
For the past year, Taiwan has been in the throes of grappling with the legacy of former ROC President Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). One aspect has involved a "rectification of names" (zhengming 正名) campaign (for example, renaming CKS International Airport as Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport), which also includes affixing the word "Taiwan" to as many state organizations as possible (a case in point being Taiwan Post). At the same time, government officials and scholars have been striving to achieve some degree of transitional justice (zhuanxing zhengyi 轉型正義) by holding Chiang and other former ROC leaders accountable for human rights abuses, especially the death and imprisonment of thousands of Taiwanese during the 228 Incident of 1947.
The debate over these issues reached a crescendo last month, when the government renamed and redesigned the sacred space of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (now National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall), while also withdrawing funding and the military honor guard from the Cihhu Presidential Burial Palace (Cihu qinling 慈湖陵寢) in Daxi (Dasi 大溪) where both the elder Chiang and his son, former President Chiang Ching-kuo (1910-1988), had been temporarily laid to rest. Both of these sites are powerful symbols of the presence the Chiang's continue to exert over Taiwan. The mammoth Memorial Hall, modeled after the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing yet also resembling an imperial palace, was constructed over a three and a half year period extending from 1976 to 1980, with the imposing bronze statue of Chiang weighing in as the fourth largest in the world. The Cihhu mausoleum was built on land originally belonging to the renowned Lin family of Banqiao (Panchiao 板橋), which was presented to the state in 1955 and used as a site for one of Chiang's residences since the summer of 1959.
Plans to rename the Memorial Hall were announced in May 2007, but the formal opening of the new site and the replacement of the renowned characters "Great Centrality and Perfect Uprightness" (dazhong zhizheng 大中至正) adorning the site's main gate with "Liberty Square" (Ziyou guangchang 自由廣場) did not take place until the end of the year. There had also been fears that Chiang's statue would be demolished or enclosed in an iron cage, but when the hall reopened on New Year's Day it was found to have been surrounded by kites and photographs commemorating Taiwan's arduous struggle towards democracy. Even these alterations caused considerable furor, especially after strongly worded statements in their favor by leading officials from the Ministry of Education and Government Information Office.
The government's decision to withdraw its support from the presidential mausoleum, which was made at the same time the Memorial Hall was being rectified, sparked a different set of rhetorical fireworks, especially when Chiang Fang Chih-yi 蔣方智怡 (Chiang Ching-kuo's third daughter-in-law) proposed having both Chiang's remains reburied in their native home of Fenghua 奉化, Zhejiang. President Chen Shuibian 陳水扁 immediately voiced his outrage, pointing out that the government had already spent NT$30 million (approx. US$925,000) in taxpayers' money to build permanent tombs for the former leaders at the Wuzhishan (Wuchishan 五指山) Military Cemetery in Xizhi (Hsi-chih 汐止; suburban Taipei). With elections for the Legislative Yuan fast approaching, the above issues became subjects of an increasingly acrimonious debate. One of the few voices of reason was none other than one of Chiang Kai-shek's descendents, Demos Chiang (蔣友柏), who posted thoughtful entries on his own blog pointing out that while his great-grandfather had been responsible for great suffering, he neither merited deification nor deserved demonization.
Now, with election fever (temporarily) subsiding, so has the controversy over the Chiang's legacy, although some have blamed the DPP's stunning defeat as being in part due to the clumsy way in which the government handled this issue. The transformation of the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall is largely complete, although its website still features the hall's former abbreviation. The mausoleum is now being managed by the Taoyuan County Government, while a new park in Daxi has been built to hold hundreds of discarded statues of Chiang Kai-shek. The wounds caused during his rule remain, but many still regard him as a great leader, and there is even some nostalgia for the rule of his son. However, the question of how to come to grips with this facet of Taiwan's modern history remains unanswered. While archives have been opened and studies published, the past has been politicized by both the DPP and the KMT, and Taiwan's sole "Truth Commission" was created by the pan-Blue camp merely to investigate the shooting of Chen Shuibian and Lu Hsiu-lien 呂秀蓮 prior to the 2004 election. However, while both democracies and dictatorships attempt to manipulate the past to serve the present, Taiwan deserves credit for allowing such topics to be the subject of free and freewheeling discussion.
1/27/2008
In Case You Missed It: New Books on Women and Family in China
(Posted by The China Beat on behalf of Nicole Barnes)
Two new English-language books by two of my favorite scholars in Chinese women’s studies are not to be missed: Susan Mann’s The Talented Women of the Zhang Family, and Harriet Evans’ The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China. Harkening to Margery Wolf’s foundational concept of the “uterine family” (see Wolf’s Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan), both works explore Chinese culture and history through the lives of women and their relationships with their sisters, mothers, daughters, and aunts.
Best known for her 1997 book, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century, whose arguments rely on a more literal and textual analysis of elite women’s poetry, in this work Mann has taken a new direction. She provides a creative reading of the poems, essays, and letters that passed between seven women in three generations of the erudite and prestigious Zhang family of nineteenth-century Changzhou (a city located between Nanjing and Shanghai). The book is as smooth as a novel, but readers like me who trust Mann’s research know that she fills in the gaps with the talent and creativity of a historian-cum-sleuth, who first reads late Qing gynecological health manuals and then deduces that Tang Yaoqing’s aunt probably told
her about the importance of women’s orgasm to conception (especially of a son!) in the weeks before her wedding.
Charting their lives through the Taiping Rebellion, Hundred Days’ Reforms, first Sino-Japanese War, and up to the eve of the Boxer Uprising, Mann shows that the oft-neglected “talented woman” (cainü) of late imperial China was a direct link to the much-celebrated “new woman,” despite Liang Qichao’s hyperbolic claim that these genteel ladies were late nineteenth-century China’s principal source of cultural backwardness and national shame. She therefore crafts a potent argument for cultural continuity across the empire-nation divide.
Harriet Evans is the celebrated author of Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (1996), and the co-editor with Stephanie Evans of Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (1999
). Some of the posters from the latter text are featured in an online exhibition, co-curated by Evans and China Beat's Jeff Wasserstrom.
Drawing on hundreds of personal interviews with urban women in contemporary China, Evans’ new book examines how the mother-daughter relationship has changed in response to the dramatic social, political, and economic changes in China over the past 50 years. With unspeakable candor, these women depict how their “uterine” relationships have alternately served as their principal means of support and their chief source of emotional turmoil. Yet despite differences in class, ethnicity, and personal experience, ultimately all the women relied on relationships with their mothers to make sense of their own gender identity in an era of rapid social change and increasing opportunities.
So why read these two books in tandem? What do the eighteenth-century cainü and the 1980s factory worker have in common? Well, a lot more than you might think. Despite sincere attempts to completely eradicate much of what might be simplistically labeled as “Chinese tradition” in the early twentieth-century New Culture Movement and the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution, Mann and Evans show that contemporary Chinese “superwomen” (nü qiangren) are carrying on the legacy of their late imperial sisters, and that in so doing they rely on some degree of cultural continuity to make sense of their lives. And isn’t that the case for all of us?
Although time, space, and mother tongue separate us from the books’ subjects, Mann and Evans bring them right into your heart. Thanks to Evans for honing in on a much-neglected subject, and kudos to Mann for giving us a highly enjoyable read in a field that, sadly, is often chided for its unbearable dryness.
Best known for her 1997 book, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century, whose arguments rely on a more literal and textual analysis of elite women’s poetry, in this work Mann has taken a new direction. She provides a creative reading of the poems, essays, and letters that passed between seven women in three generations of the erudite and prestigious Zhang family of nineteenth-century Changzhou (a city located between Nanjing and Shanghai). The book is as smooth as a novel, but readers like me who trust Mann’s research know that she fills in the gaps with the talent and creativity of a historian-cum-sleuth, who first reads late Qing gynecological health manuals and then deduces that Tang Yaoqing’s aunt probably told
her about the importance of women’s orgasm to conception (especially of a son!) in the weeks before her wedding.Charting their lives through the Taiping Rebellion, Hundred Days’ Reforms, first Sino-Japanese War, and up to the eve of the Boxer Uprising, Mann shows that the oft-neglected “talented woman” (cainü) of late imperial China was a direct link to the much-celebrated “new woman,” despite Liang Qichao’s hyperbolic claim that these genteel ladies were late nineteenth-century China’s principal source of cultural backwardness and national shame. She therefore crafts a potent argument for cultural continuity across the empire-nation divide.
Harriet Evans is the celebrated author of Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (1996), and the co-editor with Stephanie Evans of Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (1999
). Some of the posters from the latter text are featured in an online exhibition, co-curated by Evans and China Beat's Jeff Wasserstrom.Drawing on hundreds of personal interviews with urban women in contemporary China, Evans’ new book examines how the mother-daughter relationship has changed in response to the dramatic social, political, and economic changes in China over the past 50 years. With unspeakable candor, these women depict how their “uterine” relationships have alternately served as their principal means of support and their chief source of emotional turmoil. Yet despite differences in class, ethnicity, and personal experience, ultimately all the women relied on relationships with their mothers to make sense of their own gender identity in an era of rapid social change and increasing opportunities.
So why read these two books in tandem? What do the eighteenth-century cainü and the 1980s factory worker have in common? Well, a lot more than you might think. Despite sincere attempts to completely eradicate much of what might be simplistically labeled as “Chinese tradition” in the early twentieth-century New Culture Movement and the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution, Mann and Evans show that contemporary Chinese “superwomen” (nü qiangren) are carrying on the legacy of their late imperial sisters, and that in so doing they rely on some degree of cultural continuity to make sense of their lives. And isn’t that the case for all of us?
Although time, space, and mother tongue separate us from the books’ subjects, Mann and Evans bring them right into your heart. Thanks to Evans for honing in on a much-neglected subject, and kudos to Mann for giving us a highly enjoyable read in a field that, sadly, is often chided for its unbearable dryness.
1/26/2008
Taelspin for Saturday, January 26, 2008
Following up on Susan's excellent post (the first in a series) about preparations for this summer's Olympics, this Saturday edition of The Taelspin leads off with reports that members of Team USA have been issued specially designed anti-pollution masks to wear in Beijing. Tim Johnson, the Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, and author of the blog China Rises: Notes from the Middle Kingdom, gives his take on the situation.
As anyone who has been to Beijing knows, there has been an almost obsessive focus on public hygiene in getting the city ready for the games. I could go on at length here about regulation of bodily functions, hygiene, and ideas of modernity and progress, but John Fitzgerald and Ruth Rogaski have already done that far better than I ever could. For those wishing a--slightly--less academic take on the subject, check out Danwei guest author Eric Mu's humorous essay "Beijng WC, Illustrated.
Also on Danwei this week, Joel Martinson translates an article first published in the China Youth Daily on the new telenovela Journey to the Northeast (闯关东). The story, which begins in the final years of the Qing Dynasty and ends with the Mukden Incident of 1931, centers on Zhu Kaishan, a poor farmer who migrates from Shandong to Manchuria where he finds success, owns land, and hires others to work the land for him. The twist? Zhu is a sympathetic character and is not portrayed as the stock 'evil landlord' figure of so many other historical dramas. Chinese blogger Ten Years Chopping Timber wonders at the contradiction, and Joel provides the excellent translation.
The China Blogosphere mourned this week with news that Xinhua mole and language polisher Chris O'Brien is leaving the news agency. Chris' weekly dispatches from inside the Chinese spin machine were a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese politics or the media. Hopefully, Chris will keep blogging, but his glimpses behind the Xinhua screen will be sorely missed. Daily Telegraph China Correspondent Richard Spencer gives his thoughts on Chris, other media moles, and the Beijing blogging scene.
Finally, David Bandurski of the China Media Project dishes the dirt on Guangdong Province's 'twin meetings' (People's Congress and People's Consultative Committee) last week. It goes to show that even the best scripted and choreographed of provincial political events can go pear-shaped when you least expect it.
As anyone who has been to Beijing knows, there has been an almost obsessive focus on public hygiene in getting the city ready for the games. I could go on at length here about regulation of bodily functions, hygiene, and ideas of modernity and progress, but John Fitzgerald and Ruth Rogaski have already done that far better than I ever could. For those wishing a--slightly--less academic take on the subject, check out Danwei guest author Eric Mu's humorous essay "Beijng WC, Illustrated.
Also on Danwei this week, Joel Martinson translates an article first published in the China Youth Daily on the new telenovela Journey to the Northeast (闯关东). The story, which begins in the final years of the Qing Dynasty and ends with the Mukden Incident of 1931, centers on Zhu Kaishan, a poor farmer who migrates from Shandong to Manchuria where he finds success, owns land, and hires others to work the land for him. The twist? Zhu is a sympathetic character and is not portrayed as the stock 'evil landlord' figure of so many other historical dramas. Chinese blogger Ten Years Chopping Timber wonders at the contradiction, and Joel provides the excellent translation.
The China Blogosphere mourned this week with news that Xinhua mole and language polisher Chris O'Brien is leaving the news agency. Chris' weekly dispatches from inside the Chinese spin machine were a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese politics or the media. Hopefully, Chris will keep blogging, but his glimpses behind the Xinhua screen will be sorely missed. Daily Telegraph China Correspondent Richard Spencer gives his thoughts on Chris, other media moles, and the Beijing blogging scene.
Finally, David Bandurski of the China Media Project dishes the dirt on Guangdong Province's 'twin meetings' (People's Congress and People's Consultative Committee) last week. It goes to show that even the best scripted and choreographed of provincial political events can go pear-shaped when you least expect it.
1/25/2008
Beijing Olympic FAQ #1: Politics and the Olympics
(Posted by The China Beat on behalf of Susan Brownell)
Last year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) invited me to write an essay on the Beijing Olympics, and “The Beijing Effect” was published in the July-September 2006 issue of The Olympic Review. At the end of that essay I wrote, “China hopes that it will change the Olympic Games, but is the West really open to that possibility? Are we truly ready for ‘One World, One Dream’?” Since that article appeared in the official magazine of the IOC, it is not implausible that Beijing decided to answer my question. On August 8, 2007, Beijing marked the one-year countdown to the Games with the premier of what became a hit song and a slogan that one can see everywhere on TV advertisements and billboards: “We Are Ready,” 我们准备好了. Indeed, Beijing’s preparations exceed all previous Olympic Games in their scale and financial investment. Beijing is ready for us. But are we ready for Beijing?
I don’t think the outside world is ready to understand what it will see in August 2008. So I am doing my small part to get it there. My participation on The China Beat is one part of my effort. If you want to know more about me and my experience of China, take a look at the interview with me that was just posted by my fellow Fulbrighter in Beijing, Dan Beekman, who is “Blogging Beijing” on the homepage of the Seattle Times.
As one of the world’s few academic experts on Chinese sports, I am getting a lot of requests from journalists these days. And then there are my opinionated and sometimes politically-misguided family members in the U.S. (you know who you are), and my academic colleagues (thanks, Allen Guttmann). Since there are a few basic questions that get repeated over and over, I have started compiling my e-mail responses into Beijing Olympic FAQs. Below I give my answers to FAQ#1: Is it possible to keep politics out of the Beijing 2008 Olympics?
FAQ#1: Is it possible to keep politics out of the Beijing 2008 Olympics?
I get a little impatient with this naive question, "is it possible to keep politics out of the Olympics?" The Olympics have been intimately tied to national politics at least since the 1906 Intermediate Olympic Games in Athens. These were the first Olympic Games at which athletes marched into the stadium behind national flags and the three flags of the medalists were raised in the awards ceremony. To protest that Irish athletes had not been allowed to compete as a separate nation, the silver medalist in the triple jump, Peter O'Connor, climbed up the flagpole to wave the Irish flag in place of the British Union Jack that had been raised. [The first Olympics in Athens in 1896 were so well-supported by the Greeks that the IOC approved a Greek request to hold intermediate Olympic Games in the middle of the Olympiad. The 1906 Intermediate Games were the first and last because of political and economic instability in Greece.]
The reviver of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, was a rather sophisticated thinker about the relationship between sports and politics, and always understood that politics were an integral part of the Olympic Movement. IOC presidents during the Cold War (Sigfrid Edstrøm, Avery Brundage, and Lord David Killanin) often tried to forbid people from "mixing sport and politics," but that was largely part of their effort to keep the political conflicts over which they had no control from disrupting the Olympic Games. It was never official IOC policy. And it is not today. The IOC’s only official stance on politics is contained in Fundamental Principle #5 of the Olympic Charter, which states, “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”
The Olympic Games have often functioned as an alternative to mainstream diplomatic channels. The IOC is a non-governmental organization, which therefore is able to function in the cracks between governments. And it is important for it to maintain that independent intermediate position, so its presidents and other leading thinkers have correctly understood that they must maintain political independence from national governments to the degree possible. This complex political reality was captured in sayings like "keep the politics out of sport," but in order to understand what this really means, you have to delve a little bit deeper and understand the global structure that underlies Olympic sport. I will get into that in my answer to FAQ#2.
So the answer is, no, it is not possible to keep politics out of the Olympics, and in fact their political role is what makes them important in today's world and in the quest for world peace. This is as true in 2008 as it was over 100 years ago.
Stay tuned for FAQ#2: Will calls for a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games be successful?
Last year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) invited me to write an essay on the Beijing Olympics, and “The Beijing Effect” was published in the July-September 2006 issue of The Olympic Review. At the end of that essay I wrote, “China hopes that it will change the Olympic Games, but is the West really open to that possibility? Are we truly ready for ‘One World, One Dream’?” Since that article appeared in the official magazine of the IOC, it is not implausible that Beijing decided to answer my question. On August 8, 2007, Beijing marked the one-year countdown to the Games with the premier of what became a hit song and a slogan that one can see everywhere on TV advertisements and billboards: “We Are Ready,” 我们准备好了. Indeed, Beijing’s preparations exceed all previous Olympic Games in their scale and financial investment. Beijing is ready for us. But are we ready for Beijing?
I don’t think the outside world is ready to understand what it will see in August 2008. So I am doing my small part to get it there. My participation on The China Beat is one part of my effort. If you want to know more about me and my experience of China, take a look at the interview with me that was just posted by my fellow Fulbrighter in Beijing, Dan Beekman, who is “Blogging Beijing” on the homepage of the Seattle Times.
As one of the world’s few academic experts on Chinese sports, I am getting a lot of requests from journalists these days. And then there are my opinionated and sometimes politically-misguided family members in the U.S. (you know who you are), and my academic colleagues (thanks, Allen Guttmann). Since there are a few basic questions that get repeated over and over, I have started compiling my e-mail responses into Beijing Olympic FAQs. Below I give my answers to FAQ#1: Is it possible to keep politics out of the Beijing 2008 Olympics?
FAQ#1: Is it possible to keep politics out of the Beijing 2008 Olympics?
I get a little impatient with this naive question, "is it possible to keep politics out of the Olympics?" The Olympics have been intimately tied to national politics at least since the 1906 Intermediate Olympic Games in Athens. These were the first Olympic Games at which athletes marched into the stadium behind national flags and the three flags of the medalists were raised in the awards ceremony. To protest that Irish athletes had not been allowed to compete as a separate nation, the silver medalist in the triple jump, Peter O'Connor, climbed up the flagpole to wave the Irish flag in place of the British Union Jack that had been raised. [The first Olympics in Athens in 1896 were so well-supported by the Greeks that the IOC approved a Greek request to hold intermediate Olympic Games in the middle of the Olympiad. The 1906 Intermediate Games were the first and last because of political and economic instability in Greece.]
The reviver of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, was a rather sophisticated thinker about the relationship between sports and politics, and always understood that politics were an integral part of the Olympic Movement. IOC presidents during the Cold War (Sigfrid Edstrøm, Avery Brundage, and Lord David Killanin) often tried to forbid people from "mixing sport and politics," but that was largely part of their effort to keep the political conflicts over which they had no control from disrupting the Olympic Games. It was never official IOC policy. And it is not today. The IOC’s only official stance on politics is contained in Fundamental Principle #5 of the Olympic Charter, which states, “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”
The Olympic Games have often functioned as an alternative to mainstream diplomatic channels. The IOC is a non-governmental organization, which therefore is able to function in the cracks between governments. And it is important for it to maintain that independent intermediate position, so its presidents and other leading thinkers have correctly understood that they must maintain political independence from national governments to the degree possible. This complex political reality was captured in sayings like "keep the politics out of sport," but in order to understand what this really means, you have to delve a little bit deeper and understand the global structure that underlies Olympic sport. I will get into that in my answer to FAQ#2.
So the answer is, no, it is not possible to keep politics out of the Olympics, and in fact their political role is what makes them important in today's world and in the quest for world peace. This is as true in 2008 as it was over 100 years ago.
Stay tuned for FAQ#2: Will calls for a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games be successful?
Frivolous Friday: China Beat Goes Hollywood
Last year saw some curious news stories appear that linked China with Hollywood, from ones involving Mia Farrow’s critical views of the Beijing regime, to ones reporting Paris Hilton’s trip to Shanghai to attend an MTV awards show, to ones detailing sex scenes being cut from the version of Ang Lee’s film so that it could be showed in the PRC. With these still fresh in China Beat’s mind, this week’s “Frivolous Friday” offering takes the form of quiz, which tests the pop culture acumen and in some cases also the Sinological savvy of our readers. (Answers as well as bonus “You Might Be a Sinologist If…you know this factoid” queries come after all the questions.)
1. Which of the following actresses studied Mandarin at Harvard and wrote a senior thesis on anti-African sentiment in the PRC?
a) Jodie Foster
b) Mira Sorvino
c) Nicole Kidman
d) Uma Thurman
2. Which of the following actors took a Chinese history class with Jonathan Spence at Yale, cites this as having inspired him to make a film set in China, and says he read one of his former prof’s books to prepare for his role in that movie?
a) Tim Robbins
b) Ralph Fiennes
c) Kevin Bacon
d) Ed Norton
3. Which of the following actresses can be seen speaking Chinese and quoting Confucius in a film called “Stowaway”?
a) Judy Garland
b) Mae West
c) Shirley Temple
d) Lana Turner
4. Which of the following celebrities performed in a film whose name flagged a Chinese location—but did not include a single scene set in that location?
a) Jack Lemmon
b) Rita Hayworth
c) Owen Wilson
d) Jane Fonda
e) All of the above
5. Long before Steven Spielberg agreed to serve as a consultant to Zhang Yimou for the extravaganza that will open the 2008 Olympics, he made a film that opened with a song and dance number (“Anything Goes” by Cole Porter, fittingly enough) being performed in a nightclub in Old Shanghai. Was that film:
a) The Empire of the Sun
b) Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
c) 1941
d) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
ANSWERS:
1. b—and we’ve been told by a Harvard prof who read it that Sorvino’s thesis, with a little work, would have been publishable, meaning that Hollywood’s gain, in this case, was Sinology’s loss.
Bonus question…You might be a Sinologist if…you can tell us what Uma Thurman’s tie to China studies is…Answer: Her father is a noted specialist on Tibet.
2. d—though the other actors all have ties to China, since Robbins recently starred in “Code 46” (a film set in a Shanghai of the future), Fiennes starred in “The White Countess” (a film set in a Shanghai of the past), and Bacon’s architect father (who later played a key role in the redevelopment of Philadelphia) spent some time as a youth working in Shanghai.
You might be a Sinologist if you can guess which of Spence’s books Norton says he turned to in order to understand the character of the British doctor he played in “The Painted Veil”…Answer: To Change China.
3. c.
4. e—the films in question are “The China Syndrome” (a and d), “The Lady from Shanghahi,” and “Shanghai Noon” (that’s the only one with scenes set in any part of China, but only Beijing is portrayed).
5. d—though the action quickly moves from Shanghai to India.
Bonus question…You might be a Sinologist if…you know why it is somewhat anachronistic in the film when the Chinese gangsters who appear are dead set on getting hold of the ashes of Nurhaci, whom they seem to treat as a sacred figure…Answer: members of the kinds of secret societies to which these gangsters belonged tended to look at the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) as foreigner usurpers from Manchuria who had unjustly wrested control of China from the Ming (1368-1644). Since Nurhaci was a Manchu leader, they wouldn’t have worried about his ashes being scattered or destroyed in their fight with Indiana Jones.
1. Which of the following actresses studied Mandarin at Harvard and wrote a senior thesis on anti-African sentiment in the PRC?
a) Jodie Foster
b) Mira Sorvino
c) Nicole Kidman
d) Uma Thurman
2. Which of the following actors took a Chinese history class with Jonathan Spence at Yale, cites this as having inspired him to make a film set in China, and says he read one of his former prof’s books to prepare for his role in that movie?
a) Tim Robbins
b) Ralph Fiennes
c) Kevin Bacon
d) Ed Norton
3. Which of the following actresses can be seen speaking Chinese and quoting Confucius in a film called “Stowaway”?
a) Judy Garland
b) Mae West
c) Shirley Temple
d) Lana Turner
4. Which of the following celebrities performed in a film whose name flagged a Chinese location—but did not include a single scene set in that location?
a) Jack Lemmon
b) Rita Hayworth
c) Owen Wilson
d) Jane Fonda
e) All of the above
5. Long before Steven Spielberg agreed to serve as a consultant to Zhang Yimou for the extravaganza that will open the 2008 Olympics, he made a film that opened with a song and dance number (“Anything Goes” by Cole Porter, fittingly enough) being performed in a nightclub in Old Shanghai. Was that film:
a) The Empire of the Sun
b) Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
c) 1941
d) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
ANSWERS:
1. b—and we’ve been told by a Harvard prof who read it that Sorvino’s thesis, with a little work, would have been publishable, meaning that Hollywood’s gain, in this case, was Sinology’s loss.
Bonus question…You might be a Sinologist if…you can tell us what Uma Thurman’s tie to China studies is…Answer: Her father is a noted specialist on Tibet.
2. d—though the other actors all have ties to China, since Robbins recently starred in “Code 46” (a film set in a Shanghai of the future), Fiennes starred in “The White Countess” (a film set in a Shanghai of the past), and Bacon’s architect father (who later played a key role in the redevelopment of Philadelphia) spent some time as a youth working in Shanghai.
You might be a Sinologist if you can guess which of Spence’s books Norton says he turned to in order to understand the character of the British doctor he played in “The Painted Veil”…Answer: To Change China.
3. c.
4. e—the films in question are “The China Syndrome” (a and d), “The Lady from Shanghahi,” and “Shanghai Noon” (that’s the only one with scenes set in any part of China, but only Beijing is portrayed).
5. d—though the action quickly moves from Shanghai to India.
Bonus question…You might be a Sinologist if…you know why it is somewhat anachronistic in the film when the Chinese gangsters who appear are dead set on getting hold of the ashes of Nurhaci, whom they seem to treat as a sacred figure…Answer: members of the kinds of secret societies to which these gangsters belonged tended to look at the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) as foreigner usurpers from Manchuria who had unjustly wrested control of China from the Ming (1368-1644). Since Nurhaci was a Manchu leader, they wouldn’t have worried about his ashes being scattered or destroyed in their fight with Indiana Jones.
1/24/2008
This Day: The Nanjing Massacre
On January 25, 1938, The New York Times ran a single piece about the on-going occupation of the Guomindang capital, Nanjing, by Japanese troops. Hallett Abend wrote for the Times:
“Stripping away all the Japanese excuses about military necessity…the stark fact remains that the conditions in Nanking one month and ten days after the victorious Japanese Army crashed the gates of China’s former capital are so lawless and so scandalous that Japanese authorities continue to refuse permission to any foreigners except diplomatic officials to visit the city…Again on Jan. 7 Japanese authorities apologetically admitted to the writer that conditions in Nanking were still deplorable but gave assurances that the division of troops then out of hand and daily criminally assaulting hundreds of women and very young girls would be removed from Nanking within two or three days.” [i]
More than a month into the “Nanjing Massacre,” in which Japanese troops entered the city and, in search of fleeing Chinese troops, killed tens of thousands of Chinese civilians, the Times piece was part of a steady stream of reports to the U.S. via AP, Reuters, and various other news bureaus. Topics ranged from what might be considered, in the context of broader events, rather innocuous—like the Times report on January 23 that the American ambassador to Japan had lodged a formal complaint about looting of American property by Japanese troops—to first-hand accounts of violence that are heart-wrenching even seventy years later. Even so, the coverage of the Nanjing events in the American media was remarkably stark and prescient in its read of what the massacre augured for Sino-Japanese relations in the coming years.
Commemorations of the massacre have taken place already in China this year, though they have been remarkably low-key given that this winter marks the 70th anniversary of the massacre. As in past years, Japanese officials have protested those commemorations—this year focusing on the renovated massacre museum in Nanjing—with particular objection (again, a redux of earlier years) to the Chinese victim count of 300,000, which Japan views as an overestimate. (For an investigation of how the massacre has been remembered in both countries, interested readers might look at The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Josh Fogel.) But both the objections from Japan and the nationalist rhetoric from China have been at a lower level than in previous years; in China commemorations of the massacre were dampened by the government, preventing nationalistic fervor from reaching the peaks it did three years ago when there were widespread anti-Japan protests focused on Japan’s continuing struggles over accurately representing wartime atrocities in school textbooks.
The continued debates over how and when to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre point to its incredible power—right from the beginning—to focus larger political struggles, in great part because evidence of the massacre emerged from a new, evocative, popular media environment. As is frequently noted in American narratives of the massacre, from Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking a decade ago to the American-made documentary out last year (“Nanking”; rights in China have been sold to CCTV), it wasn’t just newspaper reporters who were recording the events. The most stunning accounts of the massacre are the photographs and film footage taken by regular people who were in Nanjing, from the 16mm footage shot by American missionary John Magee to the celebratory or mocking photos taken by invading Japanese soldiers themselves. It is in part this evidence of atrocity—caught on tape because the timing of the Nanjing events coincided with the popularization of cameras and the emergence of film technology—that has made this particular event a flashpoint for Japanese-Chinese relations.
[i] Hallett Abend. “Reign of Disorder Goes On in Nanking; Suggests a Mutiny: Lawlessness at Nanking.” The New York Times (Jan. 25, 1938): 1. Those with Jstor access can read a review of Abend’s autobiographical My Time in China.
“Stripping away all the Japanese excuses about military necessity…the stark fact remains that the conditions in Nanking one month and ten days after the victorious Japanese Army crashed the gates of China’s former capital are so lawless and so scandalous that Japanese authorities continue to refuse permission to any foreigners except diplomatic officials to visit the city…Again on Jan. 7 Japanese authorities apologetically admitted to the writer that conditions in Nanking were still deplorable but gave assurances that the division of troops then out of hand and daily criminally assaulting hundreds of women and very young girls would be removed from Nanking within two or three days.” [i]
More than a month into the “Nanjing Massacre,” in which Japanese troops entered the city and, in search of fleeing Chinese troops, killed tens of thousands of Chinese civilians, the Times piece was part of a steady stream of reports to the U.S. via AP, Reuters, and various other news bureaus. Topics ranged from what might be considered, in the context of broader events, rather innocuous—like the Times report on January 23 that the American ambassador to Japan had lodged a formal complaint about looting of American property by Japanese troops—to first-hand accounts of violence that are heart-wrenching even seventy years later. Even so, the coverage of the Nanjing events in the American media was remarkably stark and prescient in its read of what the massacre augured for Sino-Japanese relations in the coming years.
Commemorations of the massacre have taken place already in China this year, though they have been remarkably low-key given that this winter marks the 70th anniversary of the massacre. As in past years, Japanese officials have protested those commemorations—this year focusing on the renovated massacre museum in Nanjing—with particular objection (again, a redux of earlier years) to the Chinese victim count of 300,000, which Japan views as an overestimate. (For an investigation of how the massacre has been remembered in both countries, interested readers might look at The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Josh Fogel.) But both the objections from Japan and the nationalist rhetoric from China have been at a lower level than in previous years; in China commemorations of the massacre were dampened by the government, preventing nationalistic fervor from reaching the peaks it did three years ago when there were widespread anti-Japan protests focused on Japan’s continuing struggles over accurately representing wartime atrocities in school textbooks.
The continued debates over how and when to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre point to its incredible power—right from the beginning—to focus larger political struggles, in great part because evidence of the massacre emerged from a new, evocative, popular media environment. As is frequently noted in American narratives of the massacre, from Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking a decade ago to the American-made documentary out last year (“Nanking”; rights in China have been sold to CCTV), it wasn’t just newspaper reporters who were recording the events. The most stunning accounts of the massacre are the photographs and film footage taken by regular people who were in Nanjing, from the 16mm footage shot by American missionary John Magee to the celebratory or mocking photos taken by invading Japanese soldiers themselves. It is in part this evidence of atrocity—caught on tape because the timing of the Nanjing events coincided with the popularization of cameras and the emergence of film technology—that has made this particular event a flashpoint for Japanese-Chinese relations.
[i] Hallett Abend. “Reign of Disorder Goes On in Nanking; Suggests a Mutiny: Lawlessness at Nanking.” The New York Times (Jan. 25, 1938): 1. Those with Jstor access can read a review of Abend’s autobiographical My Time in China.
1/22/2008
Daily Reads—The Sequel: Five Valuable More-Than-Just-China Asia Sites
Last week, our blog-list focused on sites specifically devoted to the PRC or Taiwan, but astute commentaries on and information related to China Beat topics sometimes shows up other kinds of places on the web. With this in mind, we’ll be doing at least two sequels—this one on sites we value that have an Asian focus but are not China-specific, then another later on that deals with sites that have a global purview (but periodically have insightful things to say about Chinese themes).
1. Japan Focus
Since this site’s editor, Mark Selden, is the author or co-author of several important books on China, it is no surprise that, despite its title, it often carries pieces that move between Japan and its biggest neighbor. If you want to go directly to one of these, a good place to start is with Geremie Barmé’s smart take on anti-Japanese sentiment in the PRC.
2. Rconversation
This site has geographical breadth—again, no surprise, given who is behind it, as Rebecca McKinnon did stints as CNN’s Beijing and then Tokyo bureau chiefs, has been a close follower of North Korean affairs, and is now based in Hong Kong. China Beat has already linked to one of her PRC pieces, but for a sample of something else she’s done, check out her take on Yahoo and the ethics and practicalities of policing internet use in China.
3. Far Eastern Economic Review Forum
This is the recently launched companion to the former-weekly magazine that was revamped several years ago as a monthly journal of opinion. Its goal is to generate debate via mini-essays, and the editor, Hugo Restall, is not above contributing his own provocative forays into this genre, such as this look at colonialism and Hong Kong’s past.
4. AsiaMedia
Based at UCLA and largely run by students, this impressive site offers original content and links to news stories on various parts of the continent, including China. Tom Plate writes a lively regular column for it (here's a recent sample), and others who have written for it include China Beat’s own Tim Weston and Jeff Wasserstrom, as well as Chuck Hayford, who wrote this piece on the Bingdian (Freezing Point) controversy.
5. Asian Review of Books
Due to the enormous amount being published on Asia in English alone, having a website devoted to timely reviews of works on Asian themes in that language intended for general readers is of great value. The reviews tend to be positive (though this doesn’t mean they are devoid of criticisms or suggestions for improvement) and are written with readers based in Asia in mind. A good place to start checking out the site is with a review of Love and Revolution, a novel focusing on the lives of Sun Yat-sen and even more so the post-Sun years of his widow Soong Qingling.
1/21/2008
Taelspin for Monday, January 21, 2008
This past Christmas, AIDS activist and new daddy Hu Jia was arrested by Chinese authorities. He is currently in detention and his lawyers have been denied access, while his wife and newborn son remain under house arrest with extremely tight security. This month a You Tube video appeared, filmed by Hu and his wife last year, that can only be described as "Reality TV for Those Under Government Surveillance." Rebecca MacKinnon, one of the best bloggers on the media and China today, gives a searing analysis of the situation. For more on Hu Jia, the blog Black and White Cat posts a 2001 interview with Hu first published in the periodical Freezing Point.
What would you do if an ATM started unexpectedly giving you $100 bills while charging your account just $1? Such was the dilemma faced by Xu Ting, and who knew that the Guangzhou resident was a fan of the Steve Miller Band? The bank, obviously not devotees of 70s arena rock, took a different view and Xu, 100,000 RMB richer than before he went to the ATM, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. Now a higher court is prepared to reopen the case. Joel Martinson of Danwei looks at how the trial is playing out in the media and in the court of Chinese public opinion.
Finally, on the Shanghaiist, JFK Miller argues that the recent Taiwanese election (or as it is referred to here in Beijing "the elections for Taiwan's so-called 'legislature') was not a rejection of the pro-independence leanings of Chen Shui-bian, but instead hinged on domestic problems of corruption and a sluggish economy.
What would you do if an ATM started unexpectedly giving you $100 bills while charging your account just $1? Such was the dilemma faced by Xu Ting, and who knew that the Guangzhou resident was a fan of the Steve Miller Band? The bank, obviously not devotees of 70s arena rock, took a different view and Xu, 100,000 RMB richer than before he went to the ATM, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. Now a higher court is prepared to reopen the case. Joel Martinson of Danwei looks at how the trial is playing out in the media and in the court of Chinese public opinion.
Finally, on the Shanghaiist, JFK Miller argues that the recent Taiwanese election (or as it is referred to here in Beijing "the elections for Taiwan's so-called 'legislature') was not a rejection of the pro-independence leanings of Chen Shui-bian, but instead hinged on domestic problems of corruption and a sluggish economy.
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