China Around the World: Japan

The China Beat editors would like to introduce a new feature: China Around the World. We have asked scholars, journalists, and graduate students working outside China and the US to tell us how China is being covered in the local media they read. This is the first installment--from Japan.

By James Farrer

My knowledge of Japanese media coverage of China is largely limited to print media, and mostly as a regular consumer of the major liberal daily Asahi Shimbun. Despite this relatively narrow window, several features of Asahi's China coverage strike me as noteworthy.

One obvious difference with American newspaper reporting is a far greater focus on historical features. During the past year, Asahi ran an excellent series on turning points East Asian history, that included essays on Japan's colonial expansion in Korea, Taiwan, China and other parts of Asia. One series of articles compared the way these events were described in Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and PRC textbooks. In general the articles were insightful and well-documented and did not back away from Japan's historic aggression in Asia. At the same time, they discussed subjects that would not have been covered by Americans including the lives of Japanese in former colonial possessions.

These progressive elements aside, Asahi, also chases the scandalous China stories that other major Japanese outlets chase. This bias towards dramatic and/or violent events is not so different from the West, particularly US television, but the proximity and greater human resources of Japanese media in China mean that headline events there produce a huge volume of reporting in Japanese media outlets.

This year these media circuses included the Tibet riots, and the "frozen dumpling" incident in which Chinese-manufactured frozen dumplings were found to have agricultural poisons on the surface of the packages. The dumpling incident, in particular, was front page news for days, even though no fatalities were involved.

The cumulative effect of this kind of reporting is to portray China as a scary and unreliable neighbor (and also one with a great deal of ill-will toward Japan). To some extent this front-page coverage is balanced by a large quantity of more careful and neutral daily reporting, but it is these big "incidents" that seem to leave the greatest mark on public consciousness.

One minor, though progressive, feature of Asahi's China coverage, is a regular Sunday column by a Chinese columnist based in Japan for over 20 years, Mo Bangfu, who writes short breezy essays on China-centered issues. This column is significant, because in a country with a relatively small immigrant population, a regular column by an ethnic Chinese resident of Japan is perhaps a small sign of the opening up of Japanese media not only to overseas perspectives, but the perspectives of foreigners living in Japan.

While we are at it, I would like to comment on media reporting on China on the other side of the planet. I am a regular consumer of the German magazine Spiegel. I find Spiegel China reporting to be a bit like Newsweek and Time on steroids, with alarmist reports of impending economic collapse, alternating with hyperbolic stories of China's march to global domination. Despite the occasional positive story, the tone is generally very skeptical of China's social progress. For example, the story this week reads "China Inc. is running out of air," warning German firms in particular not to rely too much on the China market.

James Farrer is an associate professor of sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo and author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai.

All the Cheese in China

If you pay any attention to developments in Chinese publishing, even if only casually, you have probably come across one or more stories by now about counterfeit sequels to and unauthorized spin-offs to the Harry Potter series. And as I mentioned in my recent post about Wolf Totem, that book, too, has inspired fake Chinese sequels (Wolf King of the Plains, for example, and not just one but two books unoriginally called Wolf Totem 2, both allegedly but neither actually by Jiang Rong) and spin-offs (a series of novels about Tibetan Mastiffs that have become best-sellers in their own right, plus non-fiction works about the practical value of following the “way of the wolf”).

But the most intriguing case, to me at least, of a book that not only became a bestseller in China but also gave birth to a plethora of linked titles is Who Moved My Cheese? This work, which offers suggestions on coping with change in the workplace and in life, sold an enormous number of copies when first published in the United States. And it inspired some spin-offs, such as Nobody Moved Your Cheese! But in China, it did much more than that, giving birth to a whole subgenre and having its title make its way into popular discourse in a variety of curious ways.

I first became aware of the book’s impact on a 2002 visit to the great Jifeng Books branch located in a Shanghai subway station, which is among my favorite places to go when in the city to browse the shelves, buy new texts, and check out publishing trends. “Oh,” I thought, when my eye caught a Chinese edition of the management guide, “so they’ve decided to translate that, have they?” But no sooner had the words formed than I saw five or six other books that riffed on the title. I thought this strange, and then soon after returning to the U.S. enjoyed reading a lively July 2007 piece by Sheila Melvin in the International Herald Tribune, “Chinese Smile and Say ‘Cheese,’” that was devoted to “the cheese phenomenon” in the PRC. Melvin said that no fewer than “50 copycat versions” and plays on the title of the original had appeared in China, including ones like I Won’t Move Your Cheese and Who Dared to Move My Cheese? Strangest of all, perhaps, was one with the unlikely title of Attractive and Alluring Cheese (“cheese” entering the lexicon for “profit,” while “moving cheese” signified change).

The Chinese cheese-moving story doesn’t end there, however, for the book’s title has also inspired newspaper articles. People’s Daily, for example, ran a piece not long ago on American complaints about China’s economic rise called “Who Moved Americans’ Cheese?” And Beijing Daily News played on the term in an article about revised versions of one of the best-loved Chinese novels of all time, Journey to the West (also called The Monkey King, something that the author Wolf King of the Plains might have had in mind, or Monkey, for short): 谁动了我们的《西游记》(Who Moved Our “Journey to the West”)？

One of the curious features of this situation is how insignificant the actual food product in question, cheese, is in China. (Living in Shanghai in the mid-1980s, it was a rare thing to be able to find any variety for sale, though we sometimes managed to get a chunk of fairly strange Mongolian cheese or some canned cheese from New Zealand. Now, the situation is quite different and many more varieties—and higher quality ones!—but it is still hardly a central part of the diet of most Chinese.) This is something Melvin noted as an irony in her article, even quoting a publisher in China who joked about the temptation to change the title of the original to “Who Moved My Pickled Cabbage?”

And yet, isn’t it possible at least that it is precisely the exoticness of the “cheese” in the title that adds to the book’s cachet, as a provider of wisdom coming from afar? If so, this would just be a West-to-East variant of an East-to-West how-to guide phenomenon that has grown to curious proportions, shows no sign of going away, and depends in part on the “exoticness” involved (in this case its link to ancient China). I mean, of course, what might be called the “Sun Tzu Fever,” which has led to a dizzying number of English language websites, books, and newspaper articles that use allusions to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to help Western readers understand a current issue (like John McCain’s campaign strategy), succeed in business (without trying too hard), or win at video and computer games.

Note: I link to Danwei.org pieces at various points in this and my previous post on Wolf Totem, but this is not enough credit to give--the site is simply invaluable to anyone trying to keep track of what is being written, talked about, and published in the PRC.

Taelspin: The Spirit of May Fourth

"Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way, a road is made." - Lu Xun

This past week marked the 89th anniversary of the May 4th demonstrations, the defining event of a decade of intellectual vitality and ideological debate as teachers, students, authors and scholars drew on a panoply of ideas to make sense of the world, their nation, and how best to build a strong and vital society.

At the heart of this movement was a true marketplace of ideas. Young intellectuals rushed to read the latest issues of their favorite journals, of which there were hundreds, pages brimming with the back-and-forth of open minds at work.

The question in the hearts of these youthful, educated elite: How to save China from the ravages of corrupt politicians, avaricious foreign powers, and the stranglehold of old thinking and culture? And yet while the question remained consistent, the answers were a glorious cacophony of disparate ideologies shouted in student halls and debated in faculty dining rooms, scrawled on notebook pages and set in printer’s ink.

Whether one was a follower of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Spencer, or Karl Marx (among many others), or an academic focused on using new methodologies to mine China’s past and cultural heritage, or sought elsewhere for a way to unite a nation against the forces arrayed against her, what made the May Fourth era so special was the free expression of ideas, and the willingness of the intellectual elite to listen, discuss, and then accept or reject different viewpoints on the merits of the arguments presented.

It is a legacy of which China can be justifiably proud. Not only was this a glorious time in the nation's own intellectual history, it was one of the great periods of intellectual dynamism in the 20th century. Whenever I hear the callous remark—too often bandied about these days—that the ability to think for oneself is not a part of Chinese culture, I simply refer them to the debates between Hu Shi and Li Dazhao, the essays and reports which filled the pages of Chen Duxiu’s seminal publication New Youth, or the acid satire of Lu Xun’s stories.

And it wasn’t only between the pages. The young people of the May 4th generation organized, demonstrated, boycotted, loved, and lived according to a myriad of competing ideals.

In the PRC, May 4 is celebrated as “Youth Day” and as this important anniversary approached this year (with the added convenience of a May Day holiday), the self-conscious heirs to the May 4th generation organized their own series of demonstrations and boycotts to mixed success.

Like their May 4th predecessors, the young people of China today write espousing a strong Chinese nation and their rhetoric is filled with pride and optimism for their country’s future. The passion and fire of May 4 is certainly there as well, even if the new media is an electronic one: Sohu, Tianya, and a universe of blogs and BBSs represent the new New Youth.

But something is missing: That marketplace of ideas.

Today in China, even with the government tirelessly trying to limit access to alternative perspectives, bookstores and the Internet still abound with news, essays, translations, history, and philosophy, providing young people with an access to information far beyond the wildest dreams of the May 4^th students. But the desire to find out more, the craving to challenge assumptions and formulate multiple perspectives on complex issues is woefully absent. The youth of today write more than ever, more than any generation in recent memory, terabytes of opinion available online—but the anger and passion and fire of the May 4^th generation are now enlisted in support of a single worldview and a single perspective on a range of issues. A whole generation whose arguments are hard-wired: an authoritarian success story.

The actions of netizen fenqing and “Pro-China” protesters along the Olympic torch route around the world are strikingly antithetical to the spirit of May 4. For too many, it is no longer about expressing one’s own views, supported with the best argument and the most relevant available evidence; it is about using mob psychology, ridicule, intimidation, ad hominem attacks, and a variety of other means to silence those with whom they disagree. And the reasons for their disagreeing are for the most part anti-intellectual: I don't like you, what you say is not what I've heard or learned, and those ideas make me uncomfortable--ergo, you're wrong.

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, in the last few weeks we have seen physical violence in South Korea, the mobbing and intimidation of protesters in Australia, and death threats against a Duke University co-ed. This is not debate. This is debate with CCP-characteristics. Students grow up immersed in a system that teaches people what to think and not how to think. The culture of debate, critical argument, and the rigorous scrutiny and questioning of assumptions is simply not a part of the PRC educational regimen.

That’s a shame. The CCP was founded by key members of the May 4th movement, including Chen Duxiu, and the Party is proud of this heritage. The May 4th demonstrators make up one of the iconic images on the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. Sadly, though, while the image of the May 4 generation remains chiseled forever in stone, their spirit is rapidly being lost.

The Fur is Flying—Or, There’s More than One Way to Skin a Wolf

Every once in a while, a book linked to China comes along that garners such widely varying reviews that I begin to wonder if the reviewers all had the same text in front of them. I had this experience last with Mao: The Unknown Story, a book that I reviewed myself (hint as to my take: George W. Bush claimed to think the tome excellent; he and I rarely see things the same way; this instance was no exception). And now, along comes Wolf Totem. And, once again, disagreements are not just about one aspect of the book but about many.

One veteran reviewer of China books, Jonathan Mirsky, for example, calls Wolf Totem “the best Chinese book I've read for many years,” and presents it as both a gripping tale and one with a nicely subversive anti-authoritarian political edge. He sums up his fondness for it by saying it is “enlightening, poignant, mysterious…a miracle.” Another writer with a long engagement with China, Linda Jaivin, by contrast, noting that the book’s fans liken it to Herman Melville’s best known novel, writes that the prose is “so bloated with banality, repetition and cliché, that comparisons to Moby Dick, to my mind, relate only to the ratio of blubber to ambergris.” As for its politics, she finds these worrisome enough to inspire the rhetorical question: “Is sentimentality the last refuge of the crypto-fascist?”

I’m not going to enter the reviewing fray here, but do I think, given how much interest the book has generated, a quirky sort of list of five is in order. By the time readers get to number 5, they will have more than enough links to get a sense of the incredible diversity of the responses Wolf Totem has generated. And it is a book worth coming to terms with, even if one agrees with Jaivin’s assessment of it, since it is a rare work of fiction that sparks interest at four different points in time. Wolf Totem did so first when the Chinese edition became a runaway bestseller. Second, when Penguin announced it would pay more for its English language rights than had ever been paid for a Chinese novel. Third, when it was nominated for and then won the first Asian Man Literary Prize . Fourth, when the English language translation appeared earlier this spring, just after Nicole Barnes published her “Coming Distractions” review of it here on China Beat. And that’s not even counting the smaller bursts of interest that came along when news broke that the author, who wrote under the pseudonym of Jiang Rong, was in fact Lu Jiamin ; when a young adult version of the book came out in Chinese; and when word circulated about film and manga versions being in the works.)

1) London Calling. One intriguing thing about the Wolf Totem affair is the frequency with which Jack London is invoked in reviews—Jaivin’s, for example, and also the one Ursula K. Le Guin did for the Guardian —as a point of comparison and a likely inspiration for Lu. One of the most thoughtful reviews of the English language edition, that Pankaj Mishra did for the New York Times, is even titled “Call of the Wild”—though the reviewer takes Lu Xun rather than Jack London as his starting point (as is particularly fitting for a review that appeared on May 4th). And I’m pleased to learn (from a Google search that led me to an online copy of her c.v.) that a doctorial student at the University of Heidelberg, Lena Henningsen, has already presented a scholarly paper on the Jack London to Jiang Rong progression in lupine literature. I’ll look forward to reading this when it appears, as this is a particularly rich subject for exploration, due not only to London’s canine concerns, but also his Social Darwinism (something that some see at play in Wolf Totem’s vision of ethnicity), his popularity in China (something Le Guin notes in her review), and the fact that he wrote both fiction and essays that dealt with Chinese themes.

2) A Hundred Blooming Puns. For some reason, perhaps the animals involved, writers have been having a field day with clever turns of phrase in their writings about Wolf Totem. (This made it hard, in fact, to come up with a title for this posting, as many of the best bits of word play I could think of had already been used.) My favorite turn of phrase appears in an introduction to the Danwei.org reposting of Linda Jaivin’s Australian Literary Review piece. The introduction’s author, Geremie Barmé, refers to “Wolves in chic clothing”—a phrase that stings and sums up a lot when read in context. Runner-up (and winner in the title of a review that sums up the reviewer’s main point subcategory) is the Seattle Times piece on the book: “Wolf Totem is a prizewinner—but it’s still kind of a dog."

3) Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery. What do Wolf Totem and the Harry Potter books have in common, besides high sales figures? Why they’ve each inspired fakes and knock-offs in China, of course .

4) A Man Bites Dog Story? One of the trickiest things to unpack about the whole Wolf Totem phenomenon is how it can simultaneously involve a tale so subversive that the author needed to remain anonymous, and yet find the novel being promoted in the official press. In a sense this just reveals how far removed from, say, the Soviet situation in Cold War times the Chinese mix of market and Communist Party forces can be. Still, it is an interesting thread of what Mao might call “contradictions” to try to unravel, and a good place to start pondering the complexities is with Beijing Review’s story about the book. This story describes a surreal-sounding global launch of the English language edition that will include such things as a “seminar on nomadic culture in Melbourne” and “an eco-friendly tour to Inner Mongolia where author Jiang Rong once lived,” but never mentions (though the news was out well before it went to print) that we now know the author’s actual name (he is just referred to as “Jiang Rong” throughout) and that he had a tie to the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

5) Novel Aspects of the Novel. What was perhaps most striking of all about the book as a reader (full disclosure: I didn’t try to read it in Chinese, just waited for it to come out in English, and didn’t get very far in it when it did, finding the pace far too slow for my tastes) was simply how unlike a typical work of fiction it is. Its peculiarities are summed up neatly by Financial Times reviewer Donald Morrison (whose piece ends up stressing above all the ecological themes of the book) in the opening to his review: “The bestselling novel in modern Chinese history features lengthy lectures on anthropology, agriculture and husbandry - but no sex, hardly any women, a leading character with overlarge teeth and not a single word of dialogue.” That is not quite as snappy as Linda Jaivin’s opening—“Boy meets wolf. Boy loses wolf. Boy writes Wolf Totem, wins inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize”—but it does convey a lot about the book’s distinctive style.

Reading Recommendations

A couple issues have been generating a great deal of media interest lately: continued coverage of the situation in Tibet, and the political views (and demonstrations) of Chinese students. Here are a few recommendations for further reading on those two topics:

1. We referenced this piece in an earlier posting, but just in case you didn’t make the jump that time, we wanted to urge you to do it again. China Digital Times has this fascinating translation of a Qinghua student’s description of what happened when several Public Security Bureau officers dropped by his group’s Carrefour protest planning meeting.

2. James Fallows blogged recently on a Beijing exhibit on Tibetan history as a window onto how Chinese are thinking about Tibet’s historical relationship to China.

3. For a look at how one group of students (members of Guizhou University’s Kurt Vonnegut book club) are struggling with their visions of China’s future, see Mike Levy’s piece at In These Times.

4. For a great summary of the events in Tibet, see Robert Barnett’s review of Pico Iyer’s new book in the New York Review of Books.

5. There are interesting quotes about the protests from Chinese students gathered by Monroe Price at HuffPost (and he links to Jeff Wasserstrom’s recent piece at The Nation’s blog near the end).

6. And finally, this commentary by Kerry Brown at opendemocracy makes the tongue-in-cheek argument that China’s recent bad news, from Tibet to the torch relay, will have the effect of lowering expectations for the Olympics—a correction Brown argues was much-needed.

Vietnam’s Youth Given a Rare Chance to Protest – Against China

By Caroline Finlay

Vietnam’s history has been intertwined with that of China for thousands of years, and it hasn’t all been pretty. Wave after wave of Chinese invaders have controlled Vietnam for more than half of the last two millennia, and the influence on Vietnamese language and culture has been stronger than that of any other neighbouring country. The Vietnamese follow Mahayana Buddhism, and Confucianism continues to influence the education system. The Mon-Khmer roots of the Vietnamese language are all but drowned under the pressure of a massive number of Chinese loan words, the adoption of Chinese tonal pronunciation, and until the Latin writing system was adopted, Chinese characters.

Perhaps it’s a human characteristic that the closer we are culturally, the greater we perceive our differences. The Chinese continue to fan the flames of World War II massacres and stoke anti-Japanese sentiment. The Vietnamese do the same – but direct their anger at China. Just as the PRC’s government has given tacit approval for anti-Japanese protests, anti-Chinese protests are the only ones likely to appear on Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh’s streets. Ask a random Vietnamese person, “Which country do you hate the most?” and the answer will most likely be, “China!” The neighbors have put aside their differences in favor of trade, and in 2005, seventeen years after China last invaded northern Vietnam, China became Vietnam’s biggest trading partner.

The Vietnamese have had another opportunity to vent their anti-Chinese feelings with the visit of the Olympic flame to Ho Chi Minh City, but unlike anti-Chinese protests in the West, their complaints have nothing to do with Tibet. Popular democracy and freedom protests tend to not be covered in Vietnam’s state-controlled media, and mention of Tibet and of the monks’ protests in Burma was minimal. Instead, the Vietnamese are fixated by the Spratly and Paracel islands, of almost negligible land area but with potential oil deposits, located in the South China Sea between Vietnam, China, Taiwan and the Philippines. All four powers claim and occupy a few of these bits of land sprinkled across one of the most travelled seas in the world.

Anti-China protests are led by Vietnam’s youth, who also make extensive use of the internet. The pressure from pro-Spratly youth led to reports of famous singer My Tam refusing to carry the Olympic torch. The following was posted as a picture file, not text, because net censors and their search engines cannot read it – showing bloggers are aware of Vietnam’s increasing internet censorship. I will refrain from posting the blogger’s name or url.

“Lo ngai về tình hình bất ổn chính trị liên quan đến ngọn đuốc, MT đã bị ép buộc cầm đuốc trong ngày 29/4. . . .Vì tin tức MT từ chối rước đuốc đã nhanh chóng lan truyền trên mạng internet, forum...trên đài truyền hình và báo chí nước ngoài gây nên 1 làn sóng xôn xao và hoang manh rất lớn. Tin tức cho biết MT sẽ kh được duyệt xét xuất cảnh trong thời gian rước đuốc cũng như có thể gặp khó khăn sau này.”

“You should be very worried about the current state of affairs and the unacceptable policy regarding the torch relay - MT [My Tam] will be forced to carry the torch on 29/4... Because the news of MT refusing to carry the torch spread quickly through the internet and on forums...on television and in foreign newspapers, it caused a tumultuous and alarming impact wave. The news told us that MT will not be able to get permission to leave the country during the torch procession and that she may face difficulties in the future.”

The government’s reaction to popular internet dissent was to nip it in the bud and make a point of having My Tam carry the torch. The pop artist was later pictured smiling on April 29th when she took her turn on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City between the Chinese guards in their blue jumpsuits.

Protests were also a possibility during the torch relay, but they were very small and easily controlled.

Blogger haivuong63 posted this article outlining an effective protest at the torch relay. Again, the cautious language shows haivuong63 is aware of net censors and of promoting protests.

“theo tôi mục đích cần xác định rõ hòng có thái độ thích hợp... là lên tiếng về sự xâm lấn biển đảo nước ta của nhà cầm quyền Trung Hoa...cụ thể là Hoàng Sa và Trường Sa thân yêu. Vậy không nên lầm lẫn với việc ngăn cản buổi rước đuốc...Hãy xác định đây là cuộc biểu tình ôn hoà vì Hoàng Sa - Trường Sa. Chúng ta không nên phản đối ngọn đuốc thể thao dù đã bị bắc kinh lợi dụng...”

“According to me, the protest must have a clear goal and an appropriate manner, which is to raise our voices about China’s invasion of Vietnam’s sea and land areas... specifically in our beloved Spratly and Paracel islands. Because of this we shouldn’t act wrongly by hampering the torch procession...We must intend this to be a gentle protest for Spratly and Paracel. We shouldn’t oppose the Olympic torch even though it has been taken advantage of by Beijing.”

Many Vietnamese people remain deeply suspicious of their increasingly powerful northern neighbours, shown by blogger Ngu Yen’s stinging reply to vuonghai63:

“Con thấy mình có biểu tình cũng không thể lấy lại được 2 quần đảo, vì nhà nước mình đã chấp nhận im lặng, và tụi TQ thì quá mạnh về quân sự. Thật ra nếu nó muốn đánh chiếm VN, nó đã có thể. Hơn nữa, bộ trưởng quốc phòng mới của TQ là một kẻ kiêu căng ngạo mạn, lại hiếu chiến. Nhà nước mình không thể thay đổi được gì vì gián điệp Trung Quốc đầy rẫy và nắm các chức vụ chủ chốt trong bộ máy nhà nước. . .”

“I feel that if we have a protest that we still wouldn’t be able to get the two island chains back because our country has already silently accepted the situation and because gang-like China’s military is too strong. Truthfully, if it wanted to invade Vietnam, then it could. Furthermore, China’s new defense minister is an arrogant, self-important and trigger-happy man. Our country can’t do a single thing [about Spratly and Paracel] because China’s spies are everywhere and hold key posts in the government’s machinery.”

The Vietnamese people feel empowered at the opportunity to protest a historically bellicose neighbour, but that highlights the fact that protests at home are few and far between, and any protest can be dangerous. Blogger Dong A SG protested for Spratly and Paracel in January 2008 and was arrested and held incognito for alarming the blogging community. The official reason for the arrest was tax evasion, but shortly before being arrested, bloggers reported Dong A SG had visited pro-Spratley and Paracel blogger Dieu Cay.

Now that Vietnam has entered the WTO it doesn’t face the international human rights pressure it used to, and at the same time Vietnam is under pressure from trade partner China. This is a combination that may even eliminate the one doorway for Vietnamese youth to practice activism—anti-Chinese activism.

Caroline Finlay is a writer for Southeastern Globe, an English-language publication in Cambodia, and has also written for Global Voices.

Images taken from the following websites (follow links for more):
Spratly-Paracel Islands Map
AFP Photo of My Tam from VOA website

Top Five language and literature sites:

Two weeks ago, we published a list of websites that provide lesson plans and other resources for teaching on China. This week, we promised an equally solid list of links for Chinese language and literature resources. Chinese language learning has been increasing in the U.S. in recent years and websites that offer resources for Chinese language learning are also increasing, though American interest in Chinese does not yet match Chinese excitement for English-language learning.

1. Few websites have made Chinese-language learning as approachable (and palatable) as Chinesepod. Its “newbie” to “advanced” podcasts are available for free at its website or through iTunes (one must become a monthly subscriber to access transcripts, worksheets, flashcards and other content), and the active user community further enhances the learning experience for dedicated listeners. Chinesepod’s success points to the desire among language learners for up-to-date content that covers current events (though the program steers clear of controversial political topics), pop culture, and slang.

2. For those interested in Chinese literature (in translation) or who want to use bits of primary documents in teaching Chinese history, the Internet East Asian History Sourcebook provides hundreds of links to translations of historical documents from ancient to contemporary China, as well as maps and images. This site could have fit equally well in last week’s list, but because of its emphasis on literature, we decided to include it here.

3. Those learning Chinese in the US will also learn the pinyin Romanization system. Pinyin.info has a variety of references to help with pinyin learning, as well as their interesting blog (which has further references for those interested in learning more about the “Crazy English” program discussed in the recent New Yorker article—link to this above under “Chinese excitement for English-language learning”).

4. Zhongwen.com offers a variety of tools for language learning as well as a learner-friendly feature of a handful of classic Chinese literary sources which are cross-referenced with a dictionary (in other words, as you read, if you don’t recognize a character, you can click on it and the definition appears on the right side of the screen). The website also provides a space where you can paste in Chinese text and the website will provide the same cross-referencing.

5. John Pasden helps with the intermediate and advanced lessons at Chinesepod, as well as keeping his own website, Sinosplice, which offers a variety of language resources.

These are only a small selection of available Chinese language resources on the web. Please share your own recommendations and experiences in the comments section.

Torching the Relay

By Geremie R. Barmé

[The following remarks were written in response to a series of questions from writers at Woroni, the paper produced by students at The Australian National University. They were drafted on April 28 and revised on May 3, 2008. I would add that I was travelling in China during the Australian leg of the Olympic Torch Relay. My thanks to Tom Swann of Woroni for inviting me to respond to his questions, and to Jeffrey Wasserstrom for suggesting that China Beat post this material.—GRB]

Q: In general, the article will be asking: why was there such a powerful expression of Chinese nationalism in the Australian national capital, Canberra? We are guided by our personal observations that much of the protesting was overtly political and often antagonistic, which we think was not fully brought out in the media coverage.

Geremie R. Barmé: Chinese demonstrators in Canberra would claim that they were giving voice to righteous patriotic (rather than the more negative “nationalistic”) sentiment in the face of deliberate distortions of the real situation in Tibetan China resulting from the “Western media” demonization of the People’s Republic of China, and the way the media had handled the March disturbances in Lhasa and elsewhere in what, for want of a better expression, I would call Tibetan China (that is the areas including the TAR, Qinghai, parts of Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan with large ethnic Tibetan populations). In the days leading up to the Canberra leg of the Olympic torch relay, Chinese organizers (both official and non-official) made the case to their fellows that Canberra is a city with a small population and that if patriotic Chinese did not turn up in numbers then protesters—“Tibet splittists” (to use the Chinese jargon), adherents of Falun Gong and a rag-bag of “anti-Chinese elements”—would make a big showing of “anti-Chinese” fervor in front of the national and international media. Only a large vocally patriotic Chinese presence could counter this.

Furthermore, the demonstrators who made themselves so noisily felt and heard in Canberra had been inflamed by the disruptions of the relay in London, Paris, and San Francisco. They were also outraged by talk of a boycott of the Beijing Olympics opening on August 8 this year. These boisterous—and also very physical demonstrations—had been reported in the Chinese media and blogosphere with a level of emotional intensity bordering on the hysterical. Accounts in the official Chinese media were also highly colorful and employed the histrionic style of high-Maoist China (that is, the liberal use of morally laden terms of vituperation and condemnation—something I have written about in the chapter “Totalitarian Nostalgia” in my book In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture, Columbia University Press, 1999). During this process, the Olympic torch, something that should by all rights be regarded as a global symbol that belongs to the world community, increasingly became in the minds of many people a symbol of China and China alone. Indeed, the torch, or “sacred flame” (shenghuo) as it is referred to in Chinese (and for that matter Japanese, in which it is called seika), became a quasi-sacerdotal symbol of super-national Chinese identity. (I would refer readers to the recent biting comments made during a recent visit to Australia by the Beijing-based artist Ai Weiwei’s on what I would call the “hijacking of the sacred” by Beijing propagandists and those in their thrall. See his comments as quoted in The Australian on April 30, 2008.)

As we have witnessed in recent weeks, the issue of the Olympic Torch Relay has now become one of Chinese global pride, integrity, and national unity. The official Chinese media has also encouraged a kind of by-proxy witch-hunt to determine which among the foreign countries of “the West” (an ill-defined category to say the least), their media, politicians, and public figures are, to use expressions first coined in the US media in 2005, “Panda huggers” (xiongmao pai, pro-China), “dragon slayers” (tulong pai, anti-China) or “Panda hedgers” (xiongmao qiqiang pai, undecided). Such terminology militates against subtlety of argument, nuance, shades of difference, or complexity on “both sides.” I would also note that the “unified caliber” (tongyi koujing) of Beijing-authored attacks on the “Western media” constitute a deliberate decision by the highest power in the land to use this opportunity to mount an all-out offensive on reporting on China by the independent media worldwide. I would speculate that this is a strategic decision made with the short-term tactical aim of neutralizing international media reports on China before and during the Olympic period—a time during which China has undertaken to allow unprecedented access of the international media to the country. The long-term ramifications of this decision will be profound.

Q: Are you able to provide any information about how it was reported, and viewed, in China? More generally, how is the torch relay being reported?

GB: Over all, the relay in Canberra was reported as being a celebration of China and a resounding success. Large crowds waving flags of the People’s Republic of China and toting various slogans were shown on TV news. Naturally, within Australia there were many proud participants—and I think of Gill Hicks (who walks on prosthetic legs after having lost hers in the July 7 London bombings) and Ian Thorpe. However, as I remarked above, it is noteworthy that the torch relay has now been constructed as more a reflection of China’s global presence than merely being an activity supported by, and crucially involving, the international community.

Chinese commentators have also noted that since the “Western” (Euramerican and Australian) media is basically run by prurient sensationalism and commercial concerns, it is hardly surprising that the story of protests surrounding the Olympic relay has concentrated on shrill protests and the activities of what are invariably referred to as a “small handful” of “Tibetan splittists” and other “anti-Chinese elements.” More broadly, the Chinese state and semi-independent media have spoken darkly of the existence of an “international conspiracy” against China, one that covertly reflects irrational fears of China’s rise as an economic and political superpower. According to this logic, the contretemps surrounding the Beijing Olympics is merely the latest platform for the conspirators. Many Chinese writing on the net, or who I have encountered since March (I was in Beijing during the original Lhasa disturbances, and have travelled to a number of cities in China since then on a second trip—for reasons unrelated to these issues) also point out that they feel that China is not given due credit for the extraordinary changes that have swept the nation in recent decades that have seen the mass alleviation of poverty and the rapid modernization of the largest nation on earth. However, while conspiracy theories make for good copy, they don’t help us understand the situation, or the long-term causes of the present rhetorical extremes both in China and elsewhere. Indeed, I would hasten to point out that media paranoia and hysteria is hardly something limited to China, and it would appear that many commentators and opinion-makers internationally have joined in the fray with enthusiasm.

The early reports of the London and Paris melees in the Chinese media moved from avoiding mention of the disruptions to propagating the righteous outrage of the international Chinese community (much of which consists of mainland Chinese students living and studying overseas), and the heroic spirit of martyrdom evinced by Jin Jing, the handicapped torch-bearer who was lunged at during the Paris relay (she quickly fell from grace when she had the temerity to oppose a mainland Chinese boycott of the French-owned Carrefour chain—critics widely attacked her: “not only doesn’t she have a leg, she doesn’t even have a brain!” has been a commonly heard tagline). The Chinese media treated these early protests as the disruptive activities of “a small minority” (yi xiaocuo) worthy of nothing more than contempt. It should be noted that after the spontaneous protests in China itself against Carrefour in mid April, the authorities began to calm things down by calling on people to engage in “rational patriotism” that did not impinge on the economic weal of the nation. This is a common tactic that we have seen deployed any number of times (see, for example, my 2005 article “Mirrors of History,” reposted on May 2 by danwei.org). For their part, the owners of Carrefour were quick to claim their pro-China, pro-Olympics stance and express outrage and disgust at the events in Paris.

Q: What does the Olympics mean to the Chinese people? (Many of the protesters, and people in the media, talked in terms of one-world spirit and so on).

GB: Put simply, one could argue that the 2008 Beijing Olympics have been turned into a celebration of the People’s Republic of China’s emergence as a major global force. Years of propaganda, educational hype, and commercial spruiking by the Chinese party-state, the commercial media and international corporations who want to make a buck (or two, or millions) have added to the crescendo of hope, pride and national hubris bound up in a heady embrace during this the Olympic year [ed. note: “spruik” is of Australian origin and means to promote in public]. Extraordinary investment has gone into the physical sites of the games as well as into the redevelopment (and further despoliation) of Beijing. Voices of discord, disagreement, or doubt have never enjoyed any airtime. Those deprived of their homes or livelihoods as a result of the grand plan for the Olympics are generally mute, and “Olympic doubters” are in a minority. Those who might have concerns have no way of knowing how widely held their disquiet may be. China is not a pluralistic society, its media is guided, and its public opinion manufactured (again, this is a topic about which I have written at length elsewhere). So-called “public sentiment” (gongzhong yulun) is, I would argue, the result of long years of careful engineering. What is particularly unsettling for the uninformed observer is that those who mouth with unanimity views supported by the party-state are relatively complicit in their unreflective cooptation. I observed in my 1999 book In the Red mentioned earlier:

"As the children of the Cultural Revolution and the Reform era come into power and money they are finding a new sense of self-importance and worth. They are resentful of the real and imagined slights that they and their nation have suffered in the past, and their desire for strength and revenge is increasingly reflected in contemporary Chinese culture. Unofficial culture has reached or is reaching an uncomfortable accommodation with the economic if not always the political realities of contemporary China. As its practitioners negotiate a relationship with both the state in all of its complex manifestations and capital (often, but not always, the same thing) national pride and achievement act as a glue that further seals the pact. The patriotic consensus, aptly manipulated by diverse Party organs, acts as a crucial element in the coherence of the otherwise increasingly fragmented Chinese world." [From the chapter “To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic” which, when first published as an article in July 1995, bore the subtitle “China’s Avant-garde Nationalists.” See also the same book for the appendix entitled “Screw You, Too.”]

Q: How is the issue of Tibet viewed within China? Or other geo-political issues with which China is involved? By Chinese outside of China? Many have said that they think that the Western media is deliberately manipulating coverage of how China proceeds in its political issues.

GB: The issues of Tibet, or more generally of “Tibetan China” (that is the territories in China with large ethnically Tibetan populations in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan), are extremely complex. While the Chinese official story fixates on the bloodshed of March 14 and the activities of agitators for Tibetan independence, it judiciously avoids discussion of the protests in the other dozens of towns and cities with large Tibetan populations, or the state violence and extrajudicial punishments meted out in the process. Nor is any real attempt made to help the public understand how or why such widespread and, in the main, peaceful protests could have taken place apart from ascribing them to the “premeditated plots” of the “Dalai clique.” In the Chinese media there is now a propaganda push to extol tirelessly China’s constant contributions to the Tibetans and their material prosperity; there is scant evidence of there being any willingness to concede that there could be any reason whatsoever for anyone to protest about anything. No one asks whether the aggressive modernization foisted on the Tibetans (and enjoyed by many, but concomitantly a process that has created numerous iniquities and problems) should be questioned. With that as the rhetorical backdrop to all reporting in China then protest, even if peaceful and moderate, must invariably be depicted as the result of the callous manipulations of the dreaded “Dalai clique” and their shameful desire to see China rent apart, or for a restoration of the old lama-dominated theocracy of pre-1950s Tibet. For an excellent article on the rhetorical (and policy) dead-end that results from this kind of argumentation, see Isabel Hilton’s April 12, 2008 article “Ditch the Tatty Flag of Nationalism.”

Most people know nothing more of the Tibetan realm than a few songs and dances, a few famous spots and glib ideas about Tibetan Buddhism. They certainly know little about the economic displacement that seems to be a major issue for some protesters, or of the effects of forced sedenterization of nomad communities, or the new Party control of the selection of reincarnated lamas, all issues of great importance for people in the Tibetan areas. Chinese comments I generally hear are of a kind that we in Australia are familiar with from the days of Pauline Hanson (a right-wing parliamentarian active from 1996 who helped during the long-years of the Howard Coalition government to shift public debate to the right): remember when Aborigines were derided for being bludgers on the social security system of “mainstream Australia”? Remember too that for all of the social and economic problems of Aboriginal communities, they were blamed for their own dire straits and attacked for “having it so good” while “average Australians” were “doing it hard on strugglestreet”? Similarly, I have often heard people say in recent weeks that the Tibetans have it so good and are freer than mainstream Han Chinese; they should be grateful for all the largesse they enjoy. Issues of socio-economic importance or questions of legitimate cultural and religious concerns seem to be virtually ignored in the mainstream Chinese media, nor are the actual on-the-ground policies debated in the public realm (they are daresay the subject of far more considered discussion behind closed doors). That the public is deprived of informed information and open discussion is an inevitable reality in a constrained media environment.

On this same anecdotal level, I have encountered common expressions of contempt for Tibetans as an ethnic group (that is, that they are “backward,” with “low IQs,” are “dirty” and “resistant to modernity”) since I was first a student in China in the mid 1970s. But I would also note that, Tibet-fascination—for its culture, landscape, religion and social relations—has also been a common feature of Han culture (alternative and mainstream) since the mid 1980s (see, for example, the material that John Minford and I included in the 1988 second edition of our Seeds of Fire, Chinese Voices of Conscience). It is also said that there are numerous Han converts to Tibetan Buddhism, people who are among the many who are searching for some greater human meaning beyond the arid landscape of material acquisition that is the predominant feature of mainstream consumerism.

One of the crucially complicating factors related to events since the initial demonstrations in Lhasa on March 10 (these were peaceful protests that preceded the mob violence of March 14 and the widespread unrest and crackdown ever since) was that the Chinese authorities enforced a blackout that kept the Western media out of Lhasa and then restricted access to virtually most of Tibetan China. A lack of media freedom, and sensationalism, as well as state guided propaganda and emotionalism have added to the escalation of rhetorical violence and blind prejudice all around. For many Western media outlets, the media blackout and sensational circumstances of the torch relay have fed the frenzy. A cogent and measured reflection on the official responses to March 14 is the 12-point petition issued on March 22 by leading Chinese intellectuals and public figures. It remains essential reading.

Q: Some protesters were angry that white/non-Chinese Australians were protesting in the name of Tibet. Can you shed light on this?

GB: This is an added unpleasantness to an already unpalatable situation. Regardless of where one stands on issues related to the Tibetan question, freedom of speech, peaceful protest, and demonstration are guaranteed under Australian law. It is unfortunate in the extreme that in my home city of Canberra Chinese protesters—the majority of whom it would seem are not Australian citizens, although they naturally enjoy basic rights guaranteed under Australian law—have attempted to curtail or deny others the right to protest peacefully on non-Chinese sovereign soil. Sadly, perhaps even tragically given the scale of the perceptions now generated, many observers feel they have seen a sort of “export authoritarianism” masquerading as Chinese patriotism. A lot of work will have to be done to ameliorate this distasteful impression. It is noteworthy that some bloggers in China are also disgusted by the self-indulgent rhetorical hysteria of their (generally) middle-class countrymen and women overseas. They say that they’d like to see them go back to China and fight for political reform, media freedom, and human rights on home turf rather than making an hubristic spectacle of themselves internationally. Indeed, if China enjoyed true intellectual, media and political pluralism it would be possible to have a more rational and reasonable discussion of whether non-Chinese or non-Tibetan Australians have a right to express publicly their views on matters of international concern. Given the present state of affairs, this is simply not the case.

Q: Some have claimed that Tibet has long been part of China. Why? Or, would you say there is any academically recognized truth in this?

GB: The era of the nation state began for the territory of the Qing empire (the last Chinese dynasty, 1644-1911) in the mid nineteenth century. Like other modern countries “China” is a relatively recent construct as a modern nation-state. Prior to this time the sway of imperial rule, the relations between different imperial courts and bordering states or tributary states is what determined issues of territory. To project anachronistic views regarding the territory of the present People’s Republic of China into the distant past is a dubious undertaking at best. Similarly, to claim a unique independence for the territories of “Tibet” or “Greater Tibet” in the context of the imperial era is spurious. Although there were moves for an independent nation-state status for Tibet during the first half of the twentieth century (especially under the influence of the British imperium), such a status was not achieved in practical terms. For a study of the relations of the Tibetan areas of contemporary China to dynastic empires from the Mongol Yuan era (thirteenth century) to the high Qing (mid eighteenth century), I would refer your readers to the excellent work of the late historian F.W. Mote of Princeton University (see his Imperial China, 900-1800, Harvard University Press, 1999).

Furthermore, I would note that there is a dearth of independent scholarship on this subject of note in the People’s Republic as all historians and their research must conform to the official party-state line when dealing with issues of Chinese territorial integrity. This makes it particularly difficult for readers of Chinese alone to acquaint themselves with the rigorous, objective, and painstaking research that has been done on such issues by international scholars (not just English language scholarship), especially as the work of such scholars when produced in Chinese translation is usually censored or “cosmetically edited” when it touches on sensitive issues.

Q: Can you say anything about the concept of “motherland”?

GB: The “motherland” or in Chinese “zuguo,” which could also be translated as “fatherland,” a term with uncomfortable connotations in English, actually means “land of [one’s] ancestors.” It is a term and concept created in Japanese and Chinese during the era of Western imperial politics in the nineteenth century (see above). It has gained increased force in China over the past twenty years as the Chinese party-state (that is the nation which is run by a one-party system) has promoted patriotism as a positive unifying force, in particular through constant “patriotic education” (aiguo jiaoyu) classes from primary school onwards and popular movements that see party propaganda, patriotic sentiment and slick commercialism combined (see the chapter ‘CCPä & Adcult PRC’ in my In the Red).

Q: We find it ironic, and concerning, that many protesters were rejecting politicization but responding with further, at times quite explicit politicization; that they were responding to claims of violence on behalf of their government with antagonism and intimidation; that they were protesting for the cause of an autocratic government under the protection of a foreign democratic one. Do you think Chinese political culture is cognizant of such contradictions?

GB: One of the underlying elements of mob patriotism/nationalism in any highly charged environment is the lack of self-reflection. We see careful thought abandoned; there is an indulgence in emotionalism and the mindless drift towards extreme and simplistic responses to what are generally complex issues. The politics of the Games itself are fraught, and now more so than ever. The Chinese media in the PRC has never been clear about the various undertakings that were made to the international community to ameliorate the human rights situation in China prior to the 2008 Games, and so most people have no idea that the constant news of human rights abuses coming from China (the appalling Hu Jia case being only the most recently well-advertised case: see the enlightening article “Hu Jia in China's Legal Labyrinth” by Jerome A. Cohen and Eva Pils in the early May 2008 issue of Far Eastern Economic Review) have formed over some time a very negative backdrop to the recent Tibet issue.

It has been a great source of regret to many of us that the strident and vociferous activities of large mobs of Chinese “patriots” since London and Paris have so profoundly tarnished the image of China’s young people internationally. Furthermore, some have pointed out that the high-decibel denunciations of any who voice opinions not in keeping with what is dubbed “mainstream [Chinese] opinion” (zhuliu minyi) have created the impression that people in China and abroad are expected to support unquestioningly the People’s Republic of China, and all of its policies, regardless (for an approach that mitigates against such compliance, see the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s speech to the students of Peking University, April 9, 2008, and my April 12 analysis of it, “Rudd Rewrites the Rules of Engagement”). Doubts, questioning and informed discussion are, at present, not tolerated. Independent commentators in China have noted that while rabid patriotic Chinese demonstrators have enjoyed the right to protest internationally under the protection of the police of their resident countries, and with the full enjoyment of democratic freedoms that Western bourgeois democracies allow, in China they would enjoy no such freedoms.

Q: Questions of violence and intimidation aside, would you say that the show of support for China's Olympics, and the sense of national pride, and the sense of the need to protect it internationally, is shared by most Chinese?

GB: It is impossible to gauge what “most Chinese” think or feel, as there is no means of making such assessments. I would imagine that there is widespread pride in the Olympics and a fervent hope that the year passes without further incident. However, I would note that a people that has had a history of mass movements, agitations, rallies, and mob agitation for nigh on a century now, will not resile from further displays of collective anger and raucous protest. The Olympics will now be fraught and there will inevitably been extreme official paranoia generated by the fear that some athlete, or visitor, or even playful prankster, will unfurl a Tibetan flag or shout “Free Tibet” at some moment during the Olympics—be it in the main sports venues, or anywhere in Beijing. Everyone will have to pay the price for this in advance through over-zealous security measures and a virtual state of martial law. This will make for a baleful environment indeed. But elsewhere I have pointed out that “harmonious society” is a laden concept, one that consists of political tutelage, social quiescence and commercial frenzy, among other things.

I would further point out that many Chinese interlocutors are often more than happy to tell you what “We Chinese” feel or believe on any given topic. Given the lack of media freedom or true transparency in the Chinese public realm (added to by the shifting rhetorical ground of internet bloggers and commentators), claims that assert that individuals are able to represent anything but personal (even if it is “bestowed”) opinion are, needless to say, risible.

Geremie R. Barmé is a professor of Chinese history at The Australian National University, Canberra. He is the editor of China Heritage Quarterly, and his latest book, The Forbidden City, was just released in North America by Harvard University Press.

Critical Han Studies Conference Report

Last weekend (April 24-27), I and about 70 other students, scholars, and members of the public attended the Critical Han Studies conference held at Stanford University. Organized by Tom Mullaney of Stanford and China Beat, Jim Liebold of La Trobe University, Stéphane Gros of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Stanford PhD student Eric Vanden Bussche, the conference drew scholars from around the world—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, England, France, Belgium, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.—and from a wide variety of disciplines: history, anthropology, religious studies, literature, East Asian Studies, etc. Most importantly, it was a lot of fun.

With over 40 presenters, this event was a successful kick-off for a new subfield in China studies: Critical theories of Han-ness. Like critical theories of Whiteness as an invented racial category which shifts over time, Critical Han studies will cast an analytic eye on China’s racial majority. Given that roughly one in five people on earth could claim Han Chinese identity, this is a Herculian—or shall we say Panguvian—task, and the work has only just begun.

The organizers and participants created a lively atmosphere; even we grad student presenters felt encouraged and supported. The conference began with a quadruple opening panel: Nick Tapp called for studies that place ethnic minorities at the center, Emma Teng questioned whether Eurasian Chinese blur racial boundaries, Pat Giersch underscored the importance of thinking regionally with his case study of ethnic conflicts in 18th century Yunnan, and Frank Dikötter illuminated a world historical perspective with his discussion of the racialization of the globe. Ten panels and two days later, we ended with a triple keynote: Dru Gladney discussed the evolution of Chinese Muslim (Hui) identity, Xu Jieshun—renowned Chinese scholar of Han ethnicity—illustrated his “snowball” theory of racial absorption, and Mark Elliott painstakingly traced the etymological origins of “Han.” The following morning, those of us who still had some spark left gathered to discuss the future of Critical Han Studies—and it does have a bright future, so stay tuned.

The weekend boasted multiple successes. The participation of many Asian scholars—some now teaching in Asia and some elsewhere—gave the event a much-appreciated diversity in perspective, even if it also exposed some epistemological divides. Prolonged contact at meals, coffee breaks, and scenic walks to and from Stanford campus allowed for ongoing conversations about geographical determinism, the role of science in shoring up racism, the limits and gifts of disciplinary differences around the world, the contemporary relevance of this burgeoning field, and so much more.

Although more work is needed to shift the academic focus from Han identity as reflected in relations with ethnic minorities, to Han identity as a racial category worthy of scrutiny in and of itself, this was an excellent start. The bigger job will be figuring out how to have a constructive impact on non-academic discussions of race in contemporary China, the importance of which is borne out by recent events in and near Tibet.

Beijing Olympic FAQ#3: Which Olympic Games is most useful for understanding the Beijing Olympic Games?

Due to other commitments I have had no time to blog since February, but I hope to be able to post with more regularity now.

FAQ#3: Which previous Olympic Games provides the most useful historical precedent for understanding the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games?

For multiple reasons, I do not subscribe to the current fad for drawing parallels between the 1936 “Hitler” Games and the 2008 Beijing Games. If one is looking for actual historical connections, then I would argue that the 104-year connection between the U.S. and China through Olympic sports, which dates back to the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games, is today exerting a much greater influence on the shape of the Beijing Olympics than is the legacy of a now-defunct German regime.

The third modern Olympic Games were held in St. Louis in 1904 alongside the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (world’s fair), and while China did not take part in the sports (it would send its first Olympic athlete to the 1932 Los Angeles Games), the Qing dynasty sent the first official delegation that it had ever sent to an international exposition. It was motivated to do so by concerns about the negative national image of China promoted by the unofficial exhibits at previous fairs, such as the opium den exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The 1904 Olympics were apparently the first Olympics to be reported in the press back in China.

The world’s fair was America’s coming-out party as a world power. It had just acquired the former Spanish colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam as a result of the Spanish-American war in 1898. At the fair, it presented itself as an expanding power, with an extremely large display devoted to the Philippines. Another large section of the exposition grounds was devoted to displays intended to demonstrate that the government was succeeding in civilizing American Indians.

That the Old World was not completely happy about the emerging New World is evident in the European criticism of the Olympic Games. IOC president Pierre de Coubertin said that awarding the Games to St. Louis had been a “misfortune” and recalled, “So the St. Louis Games were completely lacking in attraction. Personally, I had no wish to attend them. […] I had a sort of presentiment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of the town.” He complained about “utilitarian America.” He also labeled as “embarrassing” the Anthropology Days, in which natives who had been brought to the fair for the ethnic displays competed in some track and field events and pole-climbing, and their performances were unfavorably compared with those of the “civilized” men who took part in the Olympic Games.

While the Americans were generally satisfied with the Olympic Games, even to this day European historians consider the St. Louis Games and the associated Anthropology Days to be one of the low points of Olympic history. It is often said that the 1906 Intermediate Olympic Games in Athens “saved” the Olympics. Historian Mark Dyreson has observed that after St. Louis it became clear that American notions of what purposes Olympic sport should serve differed quite dramatically from the notions of the European nations that made up the core of the IOC’s leadership. The conflict would remain for the rest of the twentieth century.

The first published calls for China to host the Olympic Games appeared in two YMCA publications: a 1908 essay in Tientsin Young Men, and an item in the report to the YMCA’s International Committee by C.H. Robertson, the director of the Tianjin [Tientsin] YMCA. Robertson stated that since 1907 a campaign had been carried on to inspire patriotism in China by asking three questions:

1. When will China be able to send a winning athlete to the Olympic contests?

2. When will China be able to send a winning team to the Olympic contests?

3. When will China be able to invite all the world to come to Peking [Beijing] for an International Olympic contest, alternating with those at Athens?

These three questions are now famous in China because it has taken almost exactly one hundred years for China to realize this Olympic dream. Robertson went on to note enthusiastically, “This campaign grips in a remarkable way the heart and imagination of the Chinese officials, educators, and students, and I believe it is a thing in which American boys will want to have a definite and practical part.”

Olympic sports were introduced into China in the late nineteenth century by the YMCA and missionary-run schools and colleges. The YMCA continued to play a major role in China’s sport system and its influence was still being felt until recently since many sports leaders were YMCA-trained. The last of these leaders have passed away in recent years. The IOC co-opted* the first Chinese member in 1922; he was C.T. Wang, who was active in the YMCA and a Yale University graduate. The third IOC member in China, Dong Shouyi (Tung Shou-yi) (coopted in 1947) attended Springfield College, the YMCA’s college in Massachusetts.

China imitated the St. Louis model. In 1910 the Nanyang Industrial Exposition in Nanjing was China’s first attempt at an international exposition on Chinese soil. Held in conjunction was a sporting event organized by the YMCA that later came to be known as the first national athletic games of the Republic of China (founded in 1912). The American YMCA used the Philippines as a launching point to spread sports throughout East Asia, and in 1913 the first Far Eastern Olympiad was held in Manila. They were so successful that the IOC was worried that they might be a rival to the Olympic Games – so it requested that the term “Olympiad” should be removed, and they were thereafter called the Far Eastern Championships. They were the first regional games in the world and at various times included athletes from the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Hong Kong.

One hundred four years after the U.S. hosted a world’s fair and an Olympic Games as its coming-out party, China will host the Beijing Olympic Games as its coming-out party. (Shanghai will host the World Expo in 2010). What we will see in Beijing in 2008 is what the model for promoting a national image to the world has evolved into after a century in China. The Olympic slogan “One World, One Dream” expresses this ideal: we are all part of one world, and we share the dream of prosperity and strength. As the U.S. did over a century ago, China will try to display the success of its civilizing mission among its frontier minorities. It will try to display its wealth through monumental architecture and exhibitions of economic wares. In 1904, train stations were one of the major ways of displaying wealth – the St. Louis Union Station completed in 1902 was one of the largest and most opulent train stations in the world. In 2008, sports stadiums have replaced train stations, and China will have its Bird’s Nest Stadium. The St. Louis world’s fair was the biggest of all time, just as the Beijing Games may well be the biggest Olympics of all time. When a superpower holds a coming-out party, it is a hard act to follow.

The most relevant historical lesson from 1904 is that existing powers do not necessarily welcome newcomers with open arms. As happened to the U.S. there are suggestions that Chinese views about the purposes of Olympic sport conflict with the “correct” (i.e., dominant) views. It may happen that future Olympic histories written by Westerners will record that the Beijing Games were a low point in Olympic history, and London 2012 “saved” the Games.

These days, if it sometimes seems that Chinese ideas about national image contain some throwbacks to the turn of the last century, there is probably good reason. In the meantime, the West has changed the rules of the game by adding new factors such as human rights, while China is still trying to win by playing more or less according to the rules it learned in the early twentieth century. Of course, as long as the West controls the rules of the game, it can keep changing them to ensure that newcomers never win.

* “Co-optation” is the IOC’s word for its process of selecting its members.

Next I hope to return to the Olympic FAQ that I promised in my last blog: Could China stop Taiwan from coming to the Olympic Games?

Boycott Tidbits and Queries: Some News and Views that Didn't Fit

1) Some Questions:

How do you say “I’m from Quebec” in Chinese?

When protesters gathered outside of Carrefour stores in China and sang songs (they must have sung something: one photograph shows someone with a guitar), were any of these reworked versions of “Frere Jacques”?

Why hasn’t anyone commenting on the boycotts of 2008 mentioned the one that took place one hundred years ago?

How can focusing on fried chicken alter our sense of the similarities and differences between the Chinese student protests of 1989, 1999, and 2008?

These are some questions that I either started pondering while I was writing my latest piece for the Nation’s website, which came out recently under the title “Battle of the Beijing Boycotts,” or that I began to think about after it appeared. I’ll explain the background for each question in a minute, but first…

2) A Digression (something blogs allow) about a Side Topic (what blogs allow):

As someone who writes commentaries for newspapers, magazines and online journals of opinion, I see one of the nice possibilities that writing for “The China Beat” opens up is the chance to share tidbits of information or ideas that don’t quite fit into works I do for those venues. Sometimes a thought is too obscure (for a magazine that assumes no previous knowledge about China), an opinion too irreverent (for a newspaper intended for serious readers), or an allusion to the past too difficult to communicate concisely (in a genre where word length counts). The blog can also be a place for me to mention things I wish I had thought of when I submitted a time-sensitive piece, but that didn’t come to mind until the chance to add things had come and gone. And it can give me an opportunity to point readers to supplemental readings that I agreed with or have a gripe about, when I’ve written something in a venue that doesn’t allow citations. So, this may end up being the first in a series of postings I do that supplement a commentary I’ve published elsewhere, it could start a trend that other contributors follow (in which case maybe we should add a “Self-Indulgent Sundays” to complement our “Self-Promotion Saturdays” one)—or it could turn out to be just a one-off kind of thing.

3) Finally, Some Explanations

If you are still with me at this point, you deserve to know the stories behind the question posed above. Let’s begin with why Quebec, a place I’ve never been, has been on my mind lately. The answer is simple. When the anti-French agitation began in China last month, many people were reminded, myself included, of the anti-NATO demonstration of 1999. I happened to be in Beijing while those were taking place, and as I mention in the chapter of China’s Brave New World devoted to the topic, one favor that a journalist friend did for me was to tell me how to say “I am Australian” in Chinese, just in case the mood got particularly nasty at any point. This made it natural to muse on how someone from France might use a similar geographical bait and switch to avoid becoming the object of criticism in attack.

The “Frere Jacques” question has deeper historical roots, as I’ve been tracking for some time the way that the song, which is very easy to put protest lyrics in any language due to the role of repetition in it, has been adapted by generations of Chinese students. It was sung with “Down with Imperialism” lyrics back in the 1920s and “Down with Deng Xiaoping” ones in 1989 (though some version then focused on the government having lied to the people), and it was also sung in-between those periods by Red Guards and 1940s activists (one group that wanted to go to Nanjing to present a petition but couldn’t get anyone to take them by train sang “Houche bu kai, houche bu kai, zijia kai, zijia kai”—very rough and meter-free translation: “If the train won’t start, if the train won’t start, we’ll start it, we’ll start it”…and the students ultimately drove it themselves). I’ve also heard that students put new words to the tune in 1999, so why not in 2008?

Of course, the irony would be singing a French song to protest the French. But even that isn’t new, as the French were among the imperialist powers that Republican era youths wanted to leave China be, and the Red Guards used the tune at times to denounce all capitalist Western countries. If there is something ironic here, though, it would be very hard to imagine anyone in China thinking of it that way. I once asked a friend who grew up in China during the Mao years if she found it ironic that a French song had been used to denounce the West. She asked me what song, and when I hummed “Frere Jacques,” she looked at me quizzically and said she’d always though of that as a Chinese folk tune.

The 1908 connection is just one that I should have thought of when writing the piece for the Nation. In that commentary I referred to the 1905 anti-American boycott and various anti-Japanese boycotts of 1919 and later years as precedents for the call for a boycott of Carrefour, mostly just trying to show that it was silly to think of the tactic as merely an imitation of Western calls for a boycott of the Olympics. I’m not sure why, as someone who likes to think about round number anniversaries, I temporarily blanked on the Tatsu Maru incident and the anti-Japanese boycott it inspired exactly a century ago…Maybe that event should be the subject for its own “Its Not Just 8/8/08” posting.

As for Coke and KFC and the relationship between the 1989, 1999 and 2008 student protests, there are some curious ways to take this. For example, though 1989 is generally placed in one category, while 1999 and 2008 are placed in another, focusing on these two American companies shakes things up a bit. There are reports of students gathering at the Colonel’s place to talk about protests in 1989 and 2008, while in 1999, I saw signs go up saying that a good way to show one’s patriotism was to boycott KFC. (There are also some interesting things to do with Coca Cola’s shift from a target of protest in 1999 to a kind of patriotic drink in 2008, due to the company’s sponsorship of the Olympics.)

Finally, three things to read that I either like or disagree with on issues related to the boycott piece…

1. An excellent essay from several years ago by Geremie Barmé on related themes, which in timely fashion has just been reprinted by Danwei.org to accompany an update on the Carrefour protests.

2. A Bangkok Post commentary by Philip Cunningham that has a great title (“Let One Hundred Boycotts Bloom!”) and makes some good points about young Chinese not the only ones who have grown very suspicious of late about the American mainstream media—but errs in presenting the anti-French boycott as an “imitation” of recent Western behavior (and the author, who has done some very fine pieces in the past, has covered East Asia for long enough to be well aware of the problem with this suggestion).

3. The latest weekly update by AccessAsia.co.uk, which does a far better job than I could hope to on squeezing humor out of the current situation (not one that lends itself to much frivolity). They are an excellent source of both insight and amusement, a site definitely worth book-marking. Their best line from this week is that by manifesting “dislike of the French,” we surely have a “sign that China is now fully part of globalised populst opinion.” Which just leaves me wondering, is there a Chinese translation for “freedom fries”?