Chinese Responses to Disaster: A View From the Qing

By Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley

Media reports of this week’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan highlight trends seen as impressive and new in terms of PRC responses to disaster. The quick response of state leaders symbolized by Premier Wen Jiabao’s much-heralded arrival in the disaster area only five hours after the earthquake hit on Monday, for instance, stands in stark contrast to the PRC’s handling of major catastrophes during the Mao-era, when Chairman Mao and other top leaders failed to act on reports that people were starving to death by the thousands during the Great Leap Famine of 1959-61. An estimated 30 million people died as a result of that famine, making it the most lethal famine in world history.

The willingness of the Chinese government to accept international aid, and most recently even rescue teams from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, provides an equally sharp contrast to the Mao-era government’s determination to keep news of the Great Leap Famine a secret, even if that required increasing grain exports to neighboring countries during the disaster rather than requesting foreign aid. The rapidity of the response and the massive scale of the government-led relief effort—100 rescue helicopters dropping soldiers into remote areas and 130,000 soldiers and medics mobilized for relief work within three days of the earthquake—may be new for Americans as well, particularly for those who recall how victims of Hurricane Katrina waited for a full week before 50,000 members of the U.S. National Guard were finally dispatched to the disaster area.

While helicopter drops and the acceptance of Japanese rescue teams are new for China, other facets of this week’s earthquake relief effort display interesting similarities to relief campaigns carried out in late imperial China. As a historian of famines in nineteenth-century China, I was intrigued to read that just as the rulers of China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), sought to shore up social stability during disasters by seeking to regulate grain prices in famine areas, on Thursday (5/15) China’s current government imposed temporary controls on food prices and transportation fares in the quake-hit areas of Sichuan, Gansu, and Shaanxi in an attempt to stop hoarding and speculation. Officials even punished seventeen people for profiteering.

Some American media reports (most recently a front-page LA Times article from May 17th) take the PRC’s proactive response as evidence that the government is at last beginning to govern “in a manner befitting a modern 21st century state.” A broader historical perspective, however, suggests that in fact the current PRC government is acting in the tradition of imperial China’s Confucian rulers, who often acted with alacrity during natural disasters, both out of a sense of responsibility to nourish the people and a mindfulness that failing to do so might cost them Heaven’s mandate and popular sanction for their rule.

This week China’s state-run media also reported that quake victims can depend on the government to pay their medical expenses. In late imperial China, officials and local literati argued that disasters were a result of the interaction of natural and human forces. While Heaven might send the original drought that led to a crop failure, for instance, it was believed to be a combination of people’s failure to prepare for disaster beforehand and the selfish and greedy behavior of low-level officials and underlings that allowed a drought to escalate into a major famine. The earthquake in Sichuan is obviously a natural rather than man-made catastrophe. Nevertheless, PRC officials seem as anxious as their late-Qing counterparts to ensure that what starts as a natural disaster is not transformed into something even worse on their watch. As Deputy Health Minister Gao Qiang explained when taking responsibility for preventing the outbreak of large-scale epidemics in quake areas, “We should not add to the losses caused by natural disasters and let people suffer more just because we have not done our job well.” (China Daily, 5/16).

The involvement of large numbers of private citizens provides another parallel between late-Qing famine relief efforts and the current relief campaign. During the North China Famine that killed roughly 13 million people during the late 1870s, wealthy philanthropists from cities throughout the Jiangnan region (the lower Yangzi) worked together to raise relief money for their starving compatriots in North China. Some enterprising southern literati even traveled to the northern provinces themselves to distribute grain, bury bodies, build schools for famine orphanages, and redeem women who had been sold by their starving families. While some of these men later received state recognition for their relief work, their relief activities were separate from the Qing state’s official relief campaign.

Media coverage of the current disaster has highlighted the Chinese government’s response and the PLA’s crucial role in relief work. A few reports, however, show that private citizens are responding to the disaster in impressive numbers as well. The People’s Daily reported that by Wednesday Beijingers had filled the city’s blood bank, so hundreds of additional would-be donors were asked to leave their cell phone numbers and wait until more blood was needed. The Guardian observed that wads of cash and piles of donated food and water are being driven into Sichuan not only by army vehicles, but by private or company-owned cars “adorned with red banners proclaiming the names of the donor company or work unit.” The LA Times reported that although the government “has at times warned do-gooders to stay clear and let the army and police do their jobs,” Chinese individuals and businesses have continued to play an active role in relief efforts. “The outpouring of help from the people and the speed with which many groups became involved underscored a fundamental shift in recent years as more individuals and companies take the initiative, eroding the traditional government-led approach,” comments the Times (5/15). In a particularly vivid example of citizen activism, this Wednesday a group of eighteen mountaineers from Beijing, among them doctors and business owners, flew to a quake-stricken country to rescue victims by putting their survival skills into practice, thus following in the footsteps of the late-Qing literati who traveled to northern provinces to distribute relief (China Daily, 5/15).

Chinese philanthropists leapt into action in the 1870s because by that point the beleaguered late-Qing government no longer had the resources to carry out the type of massive relief campaign that Confucian rhetoric and eighteenth-century precedent demanded. The current PRC state, in contrast, is a strong state that thus far has proved to be quite capable of conducting a highly effective relief effort. The degree of initiative displayed by non-state actors during this crisis, however, demonstrates that the state no longer fully controls—and perhaps no longer feels a need to fully control—individual and company-sponsored relief efforts. The late-Qing government reluctantly allowed foreign relief workers—many of them Anglo-American missionaries—and Jiangnan philanthropists to distribute relief in famine areas because by the 1870s it was simply too weak to deal with a major crisis by itself. The present Chinese government, on the contrary, appears to be accepting foreign rescue teams and private initiative from a position of relative strength. The assistance of Japanese relief workers or Chinese citizens is no longer viewed primarily as a threat to an insecure state, but as a way to improve ties with neighbors and further unify the nation.

Further Reading On the Great Leap Famine:
Carl Riskin, “Seven Questions about the Chinese Famine of 1959-61,” China Economic Review 9.2 (1998).
Thomas Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959-60: A Study in Willfulness,” China Quarterly 186 (2006).

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State University. Her first book, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, was published by the University of California Press this March. She is currently beginning a new research project on popular memory of the Great Leap Famine of 1959-1961.

History of Chinese Red Cross: Part I

We asked Caroline Reeves of Emmanuel College’s history department to do a two-part guest posting for us that puts the current actions of the Chinese Red Cross into historical context. Reeves has conducted extensive research on the history of the Chinese Red Cross and late Qing and twentieth century Chinese relief work.

By Caroline Reeves

Among the scenes of devastation—small bodies in shrouds; crumpled buildings and bridges; dazed survivors—another image flashes across the screen: something familiar, something reassuring to international viewers. Out of the chaos appears the symbol of the Red Cross, on the arm of a medic, on the side of an ambulance: a sign that there might be some hope—or at least some comfort—for these victims of China’s horrific earthquake.

As we watch the unreal footage of a natural disaster that has, so far, claimed almost 30,000 lives, we are brought back to our own comfort zone by the presence of that familiar symbol, the Red Cross. This is something we “know,” something that needs no translation from cryptic Chinese into English, or German, or whatever our language. But what we are looking at is not “our” Red Cross, but the Red Cross Society of China, Zhongguo Hongshizihui (RCSC). This is an organization with its own history and its own imperatives, a Society whose background gives us important insights into the China we cannot pull our eyes away from today.

The Chinese Red Cross Society was founded over 100 years ago.[i] It was established not by Americans or Britons or even Swiss intent on bringing their humanitarian institutions to China, but by the Chinese themselves. The Chinese Red Cross Society is a profoundly Chinese institution, much as the American Red Cross is deeply American and the Japanese Red Cross is inextricably Japanese. It is one of China’s most enduring social welfare institutions, outlasting diverse governments, changing conceptions of social welfare and dramatic policy swings on international involvement. Its existence reveals two important aspects about Chinese society often overlooked in the world’s media coverage of that country: first, the Chinese people’s desire to help their compatriots personally and directly, despite authoritarian governments or social systems; and second, China’s overwhelming desire to be included in the great international movements of the last 150 years, including the international humanitarian movement embodied by the international movement of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (see also Kate Merkel-Hess’s post on International Women’s Day). The media often portrays China as a monolith, “where the state decides everything and groupthink predominates” (see Wasserstrom’s formulation in his recent article), but today, when China is quite literally falling apart, it is precisely these two aspects that prevail.

Part 2: To come….At the turn of the 20th century, China was being torn apart not by earthquakes, but by political, social and intellectual currents. The formation of the Chinese Red Cross was a product of this turmoil.

i. I have written about various aspects of the Chinese Red Cross Society in a number of venues, most recently as a chapter in UC Berkeley’s publication, Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast, and Diaspora in Transnational China, and in a University of Hawaii Press book, Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History .

Further Reading Recommendations on China Earthquake

1. David Bandurski has written an interesting comparison of official and commercial coverage of the earthquake in China at China Media Project.

2. Increasingly, Chinese people are calling for probes into why so many schools collapsed in the earthquake. Recent coverage includes a report by Richard Spencer for the Telegraph and several from AFP: one here and another here.

3. Meanwhile, domestic Chinese media has begun to report that Western media is praising China’s relief efforts. Indeed, Monroe Price at Huffington Post (we have linked to several of his columns recently) writes about Western media’s “Olympic truce” with China.

4. For those interested in a better understanding of the geography of the earthquake zone, the BBC has posted an interactive map.

5. At the Chicago Tribune, Evan Osnos has written a reflection on the divisions between urban and rural China, thrown into relief by the earthquake.

6. And, in recognition of our occasional “self-promotion Saturday” feature, I also recommend Susan Brownell’s recent piece “America’s and Japan’s Coming-Out Parties: Lessons for Beijing 2008 (and the Tibet Controversy),” at Japan Focus.

Teaching Resource You Shouldn't Miss

Susan Glosser, professor of Chinese history at Lewis and Clark College and one of the first people to teach me about China in my undergrad years, has a delightful little publication that all manga afficionados and history teachers ought to know about. "Li Fengjin: How the New Marriage Law Helped Chinese Women Stand Up" is Susan's very clever means of getting an authentic and appealing primary source into English-language classrooms. Her full translation is highly suitable for both secondary and tertiary classrooms, and it's a steal for only $6.95.

A Saturday morning trip to a Shanghai antique bazaar in 1993 led Susan to a rare treasure: a delightfully (and somewhat childishly) illustrated comic book originally published in 1950 to educate the "masses" about the Chinese Communist Party's brand-new Marriage Law. This law, whose contents did not much differ from the Nationalist Party's Family Law of 1931, gave men and women equal rights to divorce and all prospective spouses an individual voice in choosing their marriage partners. All of these details and more are covered in Susan's fabulous book from 2003, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953.

Due to its potential to upset the rural social order, the 1950 Marriage Law needed widespread support from urban and rural cadres and civilians in order to help people actually secure their newly decreed marriage rights. This comic book was part of the state's education campaign and tells the invented story of Li Fengjin, a poor peasant woman who seeks divorce from her monstrously abusive husband. After going through some machinations--some of which are made necessary by the fact that the local CCP official is not yet familiar with the new law, and others which stem from her neighbors' resistance to the change--Li Fengjin finally secures her freedom, freely chooses her new husband (a chivalrous farmer who had kept her safe from her ex-husband's goons), speaks out at public rallies about her oppression under the old feudal regime, and prepares herself for a bright Communist future with her new beau. As Susan points out, the drawings are illustrative enough that even the semi- and illiterate would have gotten the point.

Susan's wonderful translation of this delightful comic book includes an introduction explaining the sociocultural background, the entire text of the 1950 Marriage Law in an appendix, and a bibliography of English-language works on women's issues and family reform. It is available from Opal Mogus Books, the garage-side publishing press that Susan created in order to launch this project.

New Olympics Blog

In yet another sign of the China-centered media hoopla certain to accompany this summer's Olympic Games, The New York Times started a blog last week, "Rings: The 2008 Olympics." The blog will draw on reporters from a variety of desks and bureaus, though much of the early coverage has been done by Jeff Z. Klein (who keeps the Times' blogs on soccer and hockey) and sports columnist George Vecsey (who promises future China reading recommendations). So far, about half the blog's posts have centered on athletic news--a good reminder after the torch relay, protests, and other Olympics-related coverage of recent months, that the Olympics are also an athletic competition.

More Links for Reading on the Earthquake

1. This BBC “Day in History” piece gives a feel for how the 1976 earthquake was covered.

2. Shanghaiist, which has had coherent as-it-happened coverage since Monday, has a feature of side-by-side Youtube clips of coverage from Al Jazeera, AP, and others. The Al Jazeera report, by Melissa Chan, receives a well-deserved nod from Shanghaiist. (You can view more of Chan’s reports for Al Jazeera here, here, and here. They are filled with unique footage.)

3. Wieland Wagner’s opinion piece for Der Spiegel contrasts Wen Jiabao’s megaphone-amplified voice (the prime minister has been touring disaster areas to comfort victims) with the political voicelessness of the Chinese people.

4. The Far Eastern Review sums up the role of new technologies in spreading the quake’s stories (mentioning, in particular, the continued crisis at the quake’s epicenter in Wenchuan; for more on Wenchuan, see here). For information on how the story is being covered by domestic media, keep tabs through China Media Project’s promised on-going analysis.

5. On the web: The Opposite End of China encourages nationalist netizens to turn their energies against the Westboro Baptist Church (which has, in its style, posted a notice that the earthquake is God’s judgment against China), Blogging for China posts several firsthand accounts from Sichuan, and EastSouthNorthWest offers one of the most complete photo galleries on the web (many of these are quite graphic). Another photo gallery can be found here.

Earthquake Coverage, Possible Action

There is an enormous amount of worthy coverage of the earthquake. If you have suggestions for other recommended reading, please post a comment.

1. Some of the best coverage in the United States is coming from NPR, who had Melissa Block and Robert Siegel in Sichuan to cover other stories at the time of the quake. At NPR, you can see photos, listen to and read the coverage of rural areas, and even hear Melissa Block, who was mid-interview when the earthquake struck, narrating what she saw from the street.

2. Rebecca MacKinnon posted a short piece with links to a variety of websites posting information from people in Sichuan.

3. Peter Hessler’s moving essay in The New Yorker includes notes and updates from his former students (some of whom he has written about in both his books).

4. The continuation of the torch relay’s domestic legs following the earthquake has touched off debate and anger in China. This AFP report gives more detail.

5. Melinda Liu’s oddly prescient mention of the 1976 earthquake in an article on the crisis in Myanmar raises questions about the relationship between (badly-managed) natural disasters and regime change.

6. China Media Project director Qian Gang (author of a book on the Tangshan earthquake) has written a statement urging all media to continue to focus on the rescue efforts, rather than rushing to contextualize and criticize.

In terms of giving to help those in need, many blogs have mentioned various charities, the most common being the Red Cross Society of China.

1. Rich Brubaker at Crossroads (the blog’s subtitle is “a review of corporate social responsibility in China”) has several posts recommending charities, as well as laying out which charities donors should give to for short-term versus mid- or long-range needs.

2. Many of the collections are being taken up by local organizations. For instance, here at UCI the Chinese Students and Scholars Association will be collecting donations directly (for those in the area, they will be on Ring Road in front of the bookstore on Thursday and Friday from 8-5). Your most direct or convenient route to giving may be a local organization or charity who will then send the funds on to an organization working in China (for example, the UCI association is collecting on behalf of Red Cross of China).

3. In the coming days, organizations like the American Institute of Philanthropy or Charity Navigator may publish recommendations for charities to give to (both have recent pieces on giving for Myanmar).

A Look Back at the Tangshan Earthquake and the Montreal Olympics

Like many of the audience in China watching the round-the-clock CCTV broadcasts about the terrible earthquake in Sichuan, I thought back to the deadliest earthquake of the 20^th century, the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, which also registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, but which killed 240,000 people. It occurred during the Montreal Olympic Games, which China did not attend because the Sports Commission was still mired in the Cultural Revolution and could not respond to friendly overtures. China would not be re-admitted to the International Olympic Committee until 1979. A section of the biography of He Zhenliang, the International Olympic Committee member in China (since 1981), evokes a vivid sense of life in those times and puts into context the tremendous changes in China over the last 32 years. Right now I am getting instantaneous e-mails from my friends and family in America, who are watching live broadcasts from China on their TVs. In Montreal in 1976 there were no live TV broadcasts and no direct-dial telephone calls to China, and it was several days before the Chinese delegation knew that the earthquake had not harmed their families in Beijing.

The biography was written by He’s wife, Liang Lijuan, a journalist. It was translated into English by myself and published by the Foreign Languages Press as He Zhenliang and China’s Olympic Dream (2007). Unfortunately this section, along with almost all of the other sections about the Cultural Revolution, were deleted from the English translation because they were said to be personal stories not relevant to China’s sport history and of little interest to foreigners.

It is interesting to note that the Zhuang Zedong mentioned here was the same table tennis player whose friendly interactions with the American Glenn Cowan at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Japan initiated the American team’s visit to China, the first official American delegation of any kind to visit China since 1949. Illustrating the craziness of those times, five years later he was obstructing “ping pong diplomacy.”

Excerpt from the end of Chapter 6, 梁丽娟，《何振梁与奥林匹克 》[Liang Lijuan, He Zhenliang and Olympism] (Beijing: Olympic Publishing House, 2001)

Never-ending “suffering correction”

[…] After Comrade Xiaoping returned to supervise their work and the situation had just started to straighten out and show some positive prospects, things suddenly collapsed again.

At the time the table tennis athlete Zhuang Zedong had already been officially appointed as the Director of the Sports Commission and authority over the entire Sports Commission was systematically held in the hands of people who shared his way of thinking. The former high jumper Ni Zhiqin became the head of the International Department. All the slogans raised by Zhuang Zedong and his buddies were in opposition to the methods advocated by Premier Zhou and Xiaoping, about whom they said that their tactics “worshipped foreign things and toadied to foreign powers” and were “capitulationism.” Everything was criticized and negated, sometimes to a laughably absurd degree. For example, they regarded referees as expressions of “capitalist privilege;” they didn’t assign places in competitions and there was no separation into first, second, or third; and they even twisted the spirit of “friendship first” so that no competitions reported scores and recorded points; and so on. In sum, the more “left” everything was, the better it was. […]

The management of the Sports Commission by Zhuang Zedong and his buddies was also absurd. At the time the newly-elected president of FIFA, Joao Marie Havelange, accepted an invitation to visit China. Havelange was friendly toward China and one of his election promises was that he would do what he could to resolve the membership of the People’s Republic of China in FIFA. However, when he visited China the leaders from the Football Association and the International Department of the Sports Commission who met with him were extreme leftists. That visit did not produce many results. After the Cultural Revolution when Havelange and Zhenliang were chatting about that visit, he said, “At the time I really didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I visited as a friend of China and wanted to discuss how to handle the problem of restoring China’s rightful place with them, and never expected that when I arrived in China I would be taken as an imperialist element and given a good talking-to.” The president of the Kong Football Association, Henry Fok, accompanied Havelange on his visit and afterward he told Zhenliang that when the Sports Commission people met with Havelange they all gave him a lesson in politics.

[…] When would the Cultural Revolution finally come to an end, when would normal living conditions finally return to the nation and to his own home? Although they wanted Zhenliang to abandon the sports diplomacy that he had done for so many years, he could not bear to leave it, but those intolerable difficulties often made him just want to go back to school to teach or to the Foreign Affairs Ministry that had wanted him in the past. However, transferring posts was not something that an individual could solve, and although he often wanted to do it, he was ultimately unable to make it happen. During that time there were unbearable days when “you can’t do what you want to do, can’t go where you want to go.” He sometimes truly felt that the days wore on like years.

The 1976 Olympic Games were in Montreal, Canada. At that time China had already gradually recovered its rightful place in a few international sport federations, and had newly joined a few. This time the Sports Commission had no choice but to use his “talents” and allow him to accompany Zhao Zhenghong and Ni Zhiqin to the international sport federation meetings held during the Montreal Olympic Games, and then to visit Mexico and Panama after observing the Olympics.

During the Olympics, the Tangshan earthquake occurred back at home. The reports of this big news outside China were chaotic and Zhenliang learned the news from the television and radio. Some reports said that Beijing was also affected, so he and the others were extremely concerned. At the time it was difficult to hook up with domestic news - there were not direct-dial telephone calls like today and you had to go through the embassy. Finally, at long last they heard that Beijing had not been seriously affected and that the cadres and families of the Sports Commission were all safe and sound, and only then could they relax. Every day Zhenliang repeated in his thoughts a line from a poem he had memorized, “但愿人长久，千里共婵娟” [“If only humans could reach past time and distance to touch the beautiful woman in the moon”], in order to send his heartfelt concern to his loved ones. When he returned from his trip, the initial chaotic conditions from the earthquake had already settled down. His family members had already left the temporary earthquake sheds built by the roadside, and were living crowded together with many others inside the garage that belonged to the department. During this year, in addition to natural disasters, China lost several of its most loved and respected revolutionary leaders. The repeated catastrophes put people everywhere into low spirits.

At the end of September 1976, the Ministry of Education borrowed Zhenliang as a adviser to their delegation to the UNESCO session in Nairobi because sports problems were to be discussed at the meeting, and also there was to be a preliminary discussion about forming an Intergovernmental Sports Committee. Just before the delegation set out, the evil “Gang of Four” was toppled from power, but the news had not yet been publicly announced and only secretly circulated inside the delegation. Everyone was so excited they could hardly contain themselves; at long last they could finally hold up their heads.

When Zhenliang came back from the UNESCO session he heard the irrefutable news that the “Gang of Four” had fallen from power. Everyone felt as if they had experienced liberation. […]

The ten years of the Cultural Revolution were finally over, and the great mountain pressing on our heads was finally pushed off. Although the best years of our lives, which had been wasted, were gone forever and could never be regained, it was worth celebrating that although we had passed through all kinds of torment, no one in the family had lost an arm or a leg, we were all mentally sound, we could still use the rest of our lives to do many things. We have a photo album at home with photos of children from small to big. In the front section there are so many happy ones, but at the end are some taken during these ten years. Everyone in these photos wears a dull expression and a forced smile. Going through the hardship of these years, we all forgot how - or were unable to - laugh. The record of this photo album abruptly stops at this point - there is nothing pasted after it. Let us end let this period of heartbreaking history here, and in the future our family will write again of a new life.

After our beautiful country had once again been restored to order, life turned over a new page. The sun shone again on every corner of the land, laughter again filled our warm home. Zhenliang hoisted the sails, put out to sea, and sliced through the waves on behalf the development of Chinese sports, so that China could fulfill its great potential in the cause of international sports.

The Sichuan Earthquake: View from Taiwan

Here in Taiwan people are following the news of the horrific Sichuan earthquake with deep sympathy and concern. This is especially true for those of us who lived through the 921 earthquake nearly nine years ago (September 21, 1999), which was also an inland quake, albeit not nearly as devastating. Here are some thoughts being expressed at this time:

1. How are our fellow countrymen doing? As of this posting, two deaths among Taiwanese in Sichuan have been reported, and over one hundred more are still missing. Those who have reestablished contact with friends and loved ones are providing moving first-hand accounts of the suffering, while some who have experience dealing with the aftermaths of earthquakes are doing what they can to help the Sichuan people to cope.

2. What can we do to assist? People remember the dark days in the aftermath of the 921 earthquake, and this has prompted an outpouring of money and relief supplies, including blankets, tents, etc. In Taiwan, the earthquake was especially hard on disadvantaged groups living in the mountains, especially Aborigines. This may also be the case in Sichuan.

3. When can our people go? Some religious and philanthropic groups are already on the way, but Taiwan's experienced crack rescue teams are still waiting for permission to enter stricken areas. Whether or not cross-Strait politics will rear its ugly head remains to be seen.

4. Will this have any impact on the Olympics? Some are also wondering what will happen to the scaled-down torch relay (now doubling as a fund-raising drive), especially when the torch arrives in Chengdu on June 18.

5. What will the long-term repercussions be? It took many long years to rebuild after 921, and the relief and reconstruction efforts put huge pressure on the KMT government. There were also unfortunate instances of inefficiency, and even corruption, with some analysts noting that the earthquake may have been one factor contributing to the KMT's loss of power just six months later.

All in all, people are deeply grieved by the terrible suffering, and hope that conditions will improve as soon as is humanly possible.

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.