FAQ#3: Could China stop Taiwan from coming to the Olympic Games?

Finally I have time to get back to the Olympic FAQ I posed several months ago:

Could China stop Taiwan from coming to the Olympic Games?

Actually, this was a trick question. Chinese leaders strongly desire for Taiwan to attend the Olympic Games and other major sports events because they are the most important venue in which Taiwan is displayed to the world as a dependent part of Chinese national territory.

Global politics usually don’t change as quickly as we would like, but they do change. One year ago I was one of many people who thought that the biggest political threat to the Beijing Olympic Games was the movement toward independence in Taiwan. Now it appears that the Taiwan situation is comparatively stable. But the symbols associated with Taiwan – including words - remain one of the most politically sensitive areas of the Olympic Games.

The story of China’s withdrawal from the IOC between 1958 and 1979 due to the IOC’s recognition of the national Olympic committee on Taiwan has recently been told in English based on newly available sources. For that background, I refer the reader to Xu Guoqi’s newly-published Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008; my chapter on “‘Sport and Politics Don’t Mix’: China’s relationship with the IOC during the Cold War,” in East Plays West: Essays on Sport and the Cold War; chapter 5 in my recent book, Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China; and chapter 8 in the book that I translated, He Zhenliang and China’s Olympic Dream (by Liang Lijuan).

The PRC’s readmission into the IOC was achieved in 1979 when the general membership approved the Nagoya Resolution, known as the “Olympic formula.” The resolution read as follows:

“The Resolution of the Executive Board is:

The People’s Republic of China:

Name: Chinese Olympic Committee

NOC anthem, flag and emblem: Flag and anthem of the People’s Republic of China. The emblem submitted to and approved by the Executive Board.

Constitution: In order.

Committee based in Taipei:

Name: Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee

NOC anthem, flag and emblem: Other than those used at present and which must be approved by the Executive Board of the I.O.C..

Constitution: To be amended in conformity with I.O.C. Rules by 1^st January 1980”

(Minutes of the Executive Board meeting, Nagoya, Japan, 23-25 October 1979, p. 103).

Note that admission to the IOC hinged upon approval of only five items – name, flag, anthem, emblem, and constitution. Officially, the identity of a national Olympic committee (NOC) is reduced to these and only these five elements. As a result of the Olympic formula neither the phrase “Republic of China,” nor its associated flag, anthem and emblem may be used in venues conducting IOC-approved activities. Mainland Chinese have been known to object to the presence of Taiwanese symbols or pro-independence ideas at venues like the International Olympic Academy in Greece or the 2004 Pre-Olympic Congress in Greece, knowing that the Nagoya Resolution supports them. From the PRC’s perspective, the intent of the resolution is to symbolize Taiwan as a dependent territory of the PRC, and the Olympic committee on Taiwan as a territorial branch of the Chinese Olympic Committee. Thus, Chinese sportspeople do not like the English phrase “national Olympic committee,” because they believe that Taiwan is not a nation. In the PRC, the phrase used is “national and territorial Olympic committees” （国家和地区奥委会).The current Olympic Charter, on the other hand, specifically states that “NOCs have the right to designate, identify or refer to themselves as ‘National Olympic Committees’ (‘NOCs’).”

The Nagoya Resolution was accomplished under a version of the Olympic Charter that stated that the words “country” or “nation” in the charter could also apply to a “geographical area, district or territory.” However, in response to the multitude of states created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union the charter was reworded in 1997 and today article 31.1 states, “In the Olympic Charter, the expression ‘country’ means an independent State recognized by the international community.” This description contradicts the PRC’s position that Taiwan and Hong Kong are not independent states. However, the existing status of Taiwan and Hong Kong was preserved by an entry in the 1996 IOC Session minutes stating that the change would not be retroactive.

Obviously, Taiwan’s status within the IOC is complicated. From the point of view of the IOC, it is an NOC equivalent to the other NOCs, and Taiwan has often pressed for its due rights on that count. However, from the PRC's perspective, the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee has an equivalent status to the Chinese Hong Kong Olympic Committee, and neither is allowed to act contrary to the interests of the mainland. So, for example, China has argued that the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee does not have the right to bid for the Asian Games and Olympic Games - a right possessed by all the other NOCs. Taiwan’s response was to bid for the World Games, the world’s biggest contest of non-Olympic sports, which will be held in Kaohsiung in 2009.

To make things more complicated, by the PRC’s logic Macau should also have its own NOC. However, the IOC works by its own logic, not by the PRC’s logic. Taiwan and China were shoe-horned into the IOC after 21 years of difficult negotiations. Hong Kong was grandfathered in after 1997 since it had had an independent NOC since 1950. Macau had never had a recognized NOC, and by the time of its return to China in 1999 the revised Olympic Charter was in place. Today there is an organization called the Macau Olympic Committee that is not recognized by the IOC (and the IOC could probably legally prevent its use of that name if it were so inclined), so any Macau athletes must represent the PRC in the Olympics.

The Nagoya Resolution had a problem: it was written in English and French, and not Chinese. When the first cross-straits sports exchange was to take place at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing, the Chinese translation of “Chinese Taipei” became a key issue. My English translation of the biography of He Zhenliang, IOC member in the PRC, describes the word games that ensued:

On our side, we were accustomed to translating “Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee” as Zhongguo Taibei Aoweihui （中国台北奥委会）, which was logical, but Taiwan translated it as Zhonghua Taibei Aoweihui （中华台北奥委会）. For a long time each had verbally expressed this Chinese title as it wished. When they took part in competitions in a third location, there was no problem of how to translate the name into Chinese because only the English names were used, and the countries that used Chinese characters to express place names, such as Japan and Korea, would just use their phonetic alphabets to spell out the pronunciation of “Chinese Taipei,” thus avoiding the problem of translating the name into Chinese characters. However, with the Asian Games being held in Beijing, there was no way to avoid the problem of the Chinese name…

[…]

Apparently they saw the one-character difference between Zhongguo Taibei Aoweihui and Zhonghua Taibei Aoweihui as an important question of principle. Actually, their unspoken reason was that “if you are the Zhongguo Olympic Committee then we simply will not be called the Zhongguo Taipei Olympic Committee so that we won’t be roped in and turned into a local organ of the Zhongguo Olympic Committee, and so we insist on being called the Zhonghua Taipei Olympic Committee.”

We discussed the matter among ourselves and concluded that this one character did not involve the question of the principle of the “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan.” (Liang, He Zhenliang and China’s Olympic Dream, 2007, pp. 338-39)

The sensitivity of the words used to describe China’s relationship with Taiwan was brought home to me when I was translating He Zhenliang and China’s Olympic Dream. The original translation of the chapter on National Reunification by a naïve American who thought that words are just words underwent such substantial revisions by Mr. He and the book’s author, his wife Liang Lijuan, that it required eight more hours for me to input their revisions. It was only later that I learned about the tifa (提法), or officially-approved wording, that is established by the Central Propaganda Department. [I first tried to get the book published in the US or Hong Kong, but was told that there was no market for it; thus it was ultimately published by the Foreign Languages Press, the foreign propaganda press of the Chinese government.]

Mr. He had been greatly frustrated by the language barrier in trying to make then-President Juan Antonio Samaranch and other IOC members understand the argument about the one-character difference between Zhongguo and Zhonghua. He asked me many times whether I thought that section of my translation would make the problem comprehensible to non-Chinese speakers. The reader may judge for her/himself from the excerpts above. Since a fair number of IOC members have now read the translation, perhaps they finally understand the extreme importance of names in Chinese culture, which traces roots back to Confucius’s “rectification of names.” In Taiwan, the struggle for recognition in the IOC is called the struggle for the “correct name” （正名）.

During the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, in accordance with the Nagoya Resolution, China’s national laws, and China’s diplomatic agreements with 168 countries, China will symbolize Taiwan as a province of China, and if history repeats itself, sometimes Taiwanese people will attempt to subvert this. When the route of the Torch Relay was introduced in April 2007, Taiwan insisted that it could only receive the torch if it entered and exited via a third, independent country, and did not come or go directly from the Mainland, or from Hong Kong or Macau, which would have symbolized that Taiwan is a part of China.

BOCOG is anticipating attempts to display ROC symbols in Olympic venues. In Atlanta in 1996, at the finals in women’s table tennis between China’s Deng Yaping and Chinese Taipei’s Chen Jing (who had won the gold medal in 1988 representing China), a Taiwanese student spectator unfurled the flag of the Republic of China and was ejected by Atlanta police, while another Taiwanese student (who was also an Olympic volunteer) was arrested for assaulting the officer when he tried to protect the first student, and spent several hours in jail. This was possible under American law because the back of the admission ticket contained fine print prohibiting, among other things “flags other than those of participating countries,” and giving the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games the authority to “eject any Spectator who fails to comply with these rules.” The back of the Beijing tickets contain fine print stating that “Chinese laws and regulations prohibit you from carrying certain articles to the Venue. You should not carry…flags of countries or regions not participating in the Games.”

This background returns me to the question of whether China could stop Taiwan from coming to the Olympic Games.

Actually, the legal right to determine the invited countries does not rest with the host city. According to the current Olympic Charter, the IOC approves the list of NOCs that will be invited to the Olympic Games. The host city contract requires compliance with the charter. Ergo, the host city cannot alter the IOC’s invitation list. (By the way, the charter now gives the IOC the right to punish NOCs that accept the invitation and then withdraw – i.e., boycott.)

Those familiar with Olympic history will recall that for the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Canada, which had established diplomatic relations with the PRC, prohibited Taiwan from competing under the name and symbols of the ROC. At the time there was debate about whether this constituted a breach of the host city contract. As recorded in Xu Guoqi’s book, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded to the House of Commons by arguing:

“[…] We do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race or, indeed, national origin. All we are saying, and it seems to me this is a policy that would have the support of any member of this House regardless of his party, provided he believes in a one China policy, is that we will not let athletes come into Canada… to pretend that they represent a country, China, that they do not represent. That is all we are saying.” (“Olympics and Taiwan,” July 12, 1976, Canada Archives: RG 25, vol. 3062, file 103)

In today's litigious environment, a breach of the host city contract might result in a lawsuit. But these days the IOC has the Nagoya Resolution in place. In sum, the lay of the land is quite different now and it's doubtful that China could get away with excluding Taiwan, even if it wanted to.

But it doesn’t want to. Since at least the 1970s, it has been the PRC's policy to invite Taiwan to major sports events, including the quadrennial Chinese National Games. "Taiwan" has often been represented by a team, but where the athletes actually come from is often unclear. This facet of China-Taiwan relations is not given much attention in either the mainland or Taiwan and so most people don’t know much about it.

Apparently the first such invitation was issued to Taiwan for the 1972 Asian Table Tennis Championships in Beijing, which were part of “ping-pong diplomacy,” with no response. A team composed of Taiwanese living in Japan and the US competed in the 1973 Asia-Africa-Latin America Table Tennis Championship. The website of one of the eight legally-recognized non-Communist Parties, the Taiwan Democratic Self-Governance League (Taimeng) , states that in 1975 Taimeng co-organized the first team to represent Taiwan in the Chinese National Games, a delegation of 297 people, including 190 athletes. They were described as “Taiwan nationals” (apparently born in Taiwan or with relatives there) living in the mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, and abroad. The team leader was said to be from New York. Other reports state that a “Taiwan” delegation also took part in the 1979 National Games. But Taiwan is not listed in the medal count for either the 1975 or 1979 Games.

By the 1983 and 1987 National Games the policy of organizing pseudo-Taiwanese teams seems to have changed because media reported that an official invitation had been issued to Taiwan by the State Sports Commission, but apparently no “Taiwan” team took part in either Games. Sports led the way in the establishment of cross-straits exchanges, and He Zhenliang represented the Chinese side in the top-secret negotiations initiated in 1988 that allowed Taiwan to send a large official delegation to the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing (Liang 2007, pp. 333-55). In 1991, for the first time a song and dance troupe and a dragon boat team from Taiwan attended the Minority Nationality Sports Games, and delegations have participated in all subsequent Minority Games; a delegation of 60 attended the 2007 Games in Guangzhou. From 2000 onward Taiwanese teams have taken part in the National Farmer’s Games, and from 2003 in the National City Games. With the exception of the 1990 Asian Games delegation, these groups are sponsored by civil cultural exchange organizations and not by the government. But most Chinese people are not aware of the difference.

In sum, after 35 years of a Taiwan presence in Chinese opening ceremonies, for most mainland Chinese people it would be unthinkable that Taiwan, in their minds an inalienable part of China, would not march into the stadium during the parade of athletes in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Keeping up with “The China Beat”—5 Recent Developments

This is just a little list, for the "Frivolous Friday" feature, made up of tidbits about the site. It may have curiosity value for longtime readers, and it may serve to provide an overview of the blog to those who have just started tuning in.

1) Thanks to an off-hand remark by Don Sutton, whose insights on mourning practices appeared on this site yesterday, contributors to the blog now have an official name: China Beatniks. This has a nice ring to it and, according to Wikipedia at least, it has a special meaning for a blog that has been paying special attention, via Ken Pomeranz's postings, to things that happened in years ending in 8: it was coined 50 years ago in 1958.

2) We've been footnoted for what I think is the first time (though if anyone finds an earlier citation, please post a comment). The footnote I have in mind comes in Geremie Barmé’s latest article, a wide-ranging look at “Olympic Art & Artifice,” which appears in the July-August issue of The American Interest and is well worth reading, containing more than its fair share of the clever turns of phrase and deft moves to bring past and present together in meaningful ways that we've come to expect from its author. When mentioning the response to the torch relay, he points readers to his guest post on this site.

3) This veers from the “Frivolous Friday” theme toward the "Self-Promotion Saturday" one (so you might want to wait a day to read what follows), but it still seems worth mentioning that we’ve begun to regularly hit or top the 500 readers-a-day mark. As we’ve been “live” for just about 5 months, this suggests a growth rate of about 100 readers a month. Another number to note is that May was the first month we’ve been in operation when we had more postings (32) than there were days (31).

4) This month, we've gotten what I think are our first comments in the response section from journalists (though we've had posts before, of course, that were either by or based on interviews with reporters), a couple of whom responded to Pierre Fuller’s piece on clichés in coverage of China. And one of these came from a journalist, Richard Spencer of the Daily Telegraph, whose own blog many of those writing for “China Beat” read. This, to switch into academese for a moment, nicely reveals the “intertextual” and "dialogic" nature of the blogosphere--and also the international nature of it (as Pierre was writing from Irvine, California, while Richard runs his blog in Beijing and another journalist weighing in with a comment, Iain E. Marlow, is based in London). We’ve had one comment recently as well from someone (Adam Teslik), who has an interesting blog called “China Government Watch” that I hadn’t paid attention to until he posted his remarks, but now will check in on periodically.

5) If May was noteworthy for an increase in the sheer number of posts, June is shaping up as notable for an expansion of disciplines and types of writers heard from. When it comes to academics, we’re moving beyond the tendency for historians and anthropologists to dominate, though historians do still account for most of the posts from within the academy. We’ve gone philosophical lately, for example, with guest pieces earlier this week by two scholars from that field, Daniel A. Bell and Daniel Little. And via the latter’s piece on Charles Tilly, sociology has been brought into the mix for a second time--the first being through sociologist James Farrer's May posting on coverage of China in Japan. (Political science has also been represented in the past, in the form of a February interview that "China Beat" reporter Angilee Shah did with scholar in that field Benjamin Read, as has comparative literature in the form of David Porter's posts.)

Looking beyond the academy, we’ve run things in the past by official “Beatniks” and guest contributors with a background in free-lance writing (Leslie T. Chang, Peter Hessler, Caroline Finlay) and by one British journalist-turned-novelist (Catherine Sampson). But June has seen our first posting by a writer of fiction originally from China (Xujun Eberlein) and our first interview with the author of a memoir about growing up in in the PRC (Lijia Zhang). And, as a final comment and yet another sign of the lack of importance of geographical boundaries where cyberspace is concerned (aside that is from issues of censorship), we were delighted to see a Shanghai-based site called "The China Herald" point its readers to Irvine-based Nicole Barnes' "China Beat" interview with Beijing-based Lijia Zhang when encouraging its readers to attend a talk the author was about to give in its city.

Earthquake and the Imperatives of Chinese Mourning

By Don Sutton

Disasters like the great Sichuan earthquake expose not only mass suffering but also the imperative of proper treatment of the dead. Long before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, governments in China had concerned themselves with such matters. Today, ranking only behind the weighty practical matters of rescue, flood prevention, and caring for the injured and homeless, sensitivity to mourning is a key measure of the government’s performance, one complicated by ethnic diversity, rural/urban differences, and the government’s own commitment to reform those practices it regards as superstitions.

An image of Taoping, the principal Qiang tourist village, taken before the earthquake.

For all the simplification of death rituals, a strong Chinese belief persists that survivors have to repay obligations incurred in life. The party state has not always done right by the dead. For the sake of party authority and social harmony the regime did little to commemorate the ordinary victims of the famine years of 1960-61 or the Cultural Revolution (1966-69). And it did nothing at all to honor those who died during the military suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement of 1989—aside from some soldiers, that is, who lost their lives. But in the earthquake crisis China’s leaders have generally been more sensitive.

The most elementary obligation, not of course uniquely Chinese, is to identify the dead and dispose of them properly: rural Chinese still widely practice burial, despite the government propaganda for cremation. Since the quake, the government has resorted to advance DNA testing for those mass burials that have been hastened to prevent epidemic disease, though many bodies in remote towns and villages still lie under the ruins.

Another obligation is to settle the souls. The dead are still thought, at least by many rural people, to pass through the underworld courts with the help of a 49-day period of periodic ritual observances. (The dangers presented by wronged, wracked and ignored souls are the subject matter of innumerable folk operas and movies.) At the site of building collapses in the past few weeks firecrackers are exploded as each new body is dug up, and the family members burn spirit money for the use of their dead in the hereafter. Proper mourning will have to wait.

Yet another longstanding obligation is to express one’s bereavement with sincerity, in the case of women, vocally. Bereaved women have been photographed wailing at quake sites displaying photographs of their loved ones. Some have called angrily for investigation into shoddy building practices at some of the schools where a total of 9,000 children and teachers died. Such demonstrations are usually proscribed, but given the moral resonance of mourning, the police have been hard put to stop them. Whether the calls for legal remedy will outweigh the need to protect local party officials, who are part of the leadership’s base, is yet to be known. But the obligation to condole sincerely is equally Chinese. While official ceremonies favor speeches and dirges, Premier Wen and other officials, realizing this obligation, have displayed arduous commitment and genuine emotion. A Chinese journalist’s account of “Grandpa Wen” refusing to treat his abrasions when he slipped in the rubble is strongly reminiscent of imperial officials who fasted and braved the elements during drought and other emergencies in order to share their people’s suffering.

Emergency conditions have, then, interfered with normal mourning, and local and official extemporizations have also reflected different conceptions. What is proper mourning is also complicated by China’s ethnic diversity. It is at first sight curious that so little has been said about the Qiang minority, which dominates Wenchuan county near the epicenter and must have sent many of its best and brightest to the collapsed middle school. Tourists who have visited nearby Taoping hamlet must be wondering how the great unmortared stone towers in which many locals live could have withstood the earthquake, and indeed Taoping is on the list of affected places. Such communities used to mourn their dead with a shaman’s martial performance, and, in the case of deaths by accident, cremated the bodies. But the Qiang are relatively assimilated; while their colorful traditionalism and picturesqueness are normally played up for tourists and in TV performances for national holidays, government reports in the crisis have preferred to underline the nation’s solidarity behind all of its citizens.

Coming in the same year as the great southern snowfall and just two months after the Tibetan disturbances, the Wenchuan earthquake must have reminded some Chinese of 1976, the year of the Tangshan earthquake. Historically, national disasters were signs of imbalance in the world, cracks in the political firmament, even harbingers of a new regime, as the heavenly mandate shifted to a new dynastic pretender. Even in 1976 these ideas were archaic, for the last emperor of the Qing (1644-1911) had abdicated some 64 years earlier, but people could not help noticing that two leading revolutionary leaders, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, died in the months shortly before that earthquake. When Mao Zedong died that September, followed by the removal of the radical group now cursed as the Gang of Four, the pattern seemed to be confirmed. Within two years Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were inaugurated. An earthquake had signaled vast political change.

Today’s leaders, in more secure and prosperous times, must have remembered the inadequate response of the radical leadership in 1976. The Gang of Four had seen the relief as a distraction from the current political campaign against Deng Xiaoping, then temporarily out of power, and it had been Mao’s recently designated heir Hua Guofeng who went a week after the Tangshan quake to take command of the relief work, an act that won him great political credit and may have helped the overthrow of the Gang of Four after Mao’s death. Premier Wen Jiabao came within an hour an a half to supervise relief, and unlike Hua Guofeng who in those post-Cultural Revolution days preached self-reliance, Wen has opened China’s disaster to foreign help and media transparency in a spirit of globalism suiting the year of the Chinese Olympics. Proof that 1976 was on the leaders’ minds came when they set mourning for the 70,000 earthquake dead at three days, beginning with three minutes of silence nationwide, concurrent with the sounding of factory and ship sirens and horn blasts—exactly the same as for Mao Zedong. (Deng Xiaoping in 1997 got only the sirens and horn blasts, with six days of pro-forma mourning.)

Some of the national mourning has been under official direction: a Japanese news team reported a CCTV producer carefully instructing relief workers to dig, pause, and doff their caps just before the three minutes of national silence. Such coaching in the ways of modernity recalls the sedulous efforts, as the days of the Olympics approach, to reform the city manners of Beijing inhabitants. Old customs have this year been modified: in some places the candles customarily floated on streams on June 7, the eve of the Duanwu festival, were specially dedicated to the victims of the May 12 quake. New national means of mourning have also sprung up, more or less spontaneously. There have been parades of young people shouting patriotic slogans, urging the survivors to take courage, and sitting after dark around candles in the shape of “5/12.“

Even more novel is the huge expansion of condolence pages on the Internet: on one combined site 70,000 people have selected virtual flowers and left a brief message. The principal theme of these web messages is to wish for the fortitude of the bereaved, and urge the Chinese people to be strong and united. Many Internet users offer consolation that the dead children are already in heaven; maybe, say some, they are already reborn—a surprisingly Buddhist sentiment for the city folk who make up most Internet users. Whatever form is used, the sympathy seems heartfelt, and is infused with a patriotic fervor that reminds foreign reporters of Han Chinese reactions to criticisms of China’s Tibet policy a few weeks earlier. Anticipatory pride in China’s upcoming Olympics fortifies these very varied expressions—no doubt we shall soon be hearing similar patriotic cries of jiayou and wansui as China proudly counts its gold Olympic medals.

One of the strangest events has been the solemn burial (with speeches and food offerings) of the only panda that died at the Wolong reserve in the quake zone; but it makes sense if we recall the ubiquitous use of the panda (above all in Sichuan) as a national symbol.

The party leaders may have mixed feelings at this point: they seem to have coped well with the crisis, and now proclaim victory in the battle with nature in a hi-tech make-over of Maoist efforts, having mobilized the PLA, in particular, with notably more success than in 1976. With the help of unaccustomed flexibility from the Propaganda Department as it reaches out to an international audience, they ride at the top of a wave of popularity. But as they contemplate the public’s spontaneous reactions, including the practical intervention of NGO’s and private car owners who organized to bring relief from Chengdu to the quake zone, they might harbor some worries: Will the Wenchuan parents' anger at school building code violations be picked up by elements of the press? (as it was in a Sina.com blog headed "Who killed our children?") Will independently channeled emotion in the public sphere inevitably back the party state in future crises? Will other leaders have to switch to the unconventionally populist style that Grandpa Wen has adopted so successfully in this time of mourning and recuperation?

The author with Qiang people dressed for a festival in Songpan, Aba Prefecture, Sichuan.

Donald S. Sutton (Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University) wrote an article on death rituals in Modern China (January 2007). He co-edited Empire at the Margins (UC Press, 2006) and with Xiaofei Kang is completing an NEH-supported study of religion, ethnicity and tourism in Songpan, Aba prefecture, a few hundred kilometers to the north of the 2008 quake epicenter. An interview with Karen Krüger of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published on June 12, prompted the writing of this essay.

Above and right, more photos by the author of Qiang national minority at Huanglong, Aba Prefecture, during the festival of 2004, and, below, a photo of several men practicing throat-singing.

Charles Tilly’s Influence on the China Field

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

By Daniel Little

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Imperial Ways

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

By Daniel A. Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China Annals: Interview with Lijia Zhang

Lijia Zhang, most recently the author of Socialism is Great!, is also a freelance journalist with a great sense of style and an awesome website. Recently she entertained Nicole Barnes of the China Beat with an interview about her work. Her latest book is auto-biographical and narrates the decade that she spent working in a munitions factory, one of Communist China’s notoriously boring state-owned enterprises. Hindsight is glorious; Zhang’s beautiful writing transforms even this drab existence into an entertaining page-turner.

NB: As a freelance journalist, you seem to have a lot of control over your topics. Your articles cover the most pressing social issues--child labor, kidnapped brides, and rural suicide rates--as well as the side effects of economic growth--migrating sand dunes, sexual liberation, and the "toilet revolution". What draws you to your topics?

LZ: First of all, let me stress that I don't write for domestic publications, which means I don't have to exercise self-censorship. I am a freelancer. I chose to write subjects that interest me. Coming from a lower social background, I like to focus on the 'little people's struggle, child labour, physically and emotionally displaced migrants and rural women. I also like to write stories that illustrate the changes the society is going through; all are very human stories.

NB: You write both journalistic articles and fiction so beautifully, in your non-native English. Do you ever find that the journalist and novelist in you struggle for dominance? How do you balance the two distinct styles in your professional life?

LZ: Very good question. When I was young, I dreamt about becoming a writer and a journalist – in fact, I didn't quite understand the difference between the two. Now I do. To start with, it is too difficult to make a living from book writing, so I have to work as a journalist. Actually, I love being a journalist. People's lives always fascinate me and I do meet a lot of interesting people through my work. Also, book writing is such a huge undertaking and a solitary practice. I enjoy the social aspect of journalistic work. Indeed, they can be complimentary to each other. I wrote a long feature on the issue of trafficking women – women being kidnapped and sold as wives to farmers– and I am pondering about making that the subject of my next book.

NB: Could you briefly describe the story line of your new memoir, "Socialism is Great!" to our blog readers?

[Blurb from the back cover of her book] A spirited memoir by a former Chinese factory worker who grew up in Nanjing, participated in the Tiananmen Square protest, and ended up an international journalist.

Lijia Zhang worked as a teenager in a factory producing missiles designed to reach North America, queuing every month to give evidence to the "period police" that she wasn't pregnant. In the oppressive routine of guarded compound and political meetings, Zhang's disillusionment with "The Glorious Cause" drove her to study English, which strengthened her intellectual independence – from bright, western style clothes to organizing the largest demonstration by Nanjing workers in support of Tiananmen Square Protest in 1989. By narrating the changes in her own life, Zhang chronicles the momentous shift in China's economic policy: her factory, still an ICMB manufacturer, won the bid to cast a giant bronze Buddha as the country went crazy for profit. Written in English, "Socialism Is Great!" is a testament to Zhang's personal triumphs over the controlled existence that was supposed to be her destiny.

NB: Was writing your memoir cathartic in any way, or was it difficult to bring up the past?

LZ: Writing has always been my way to make sense of my life. And I always find it very therapeutic. Yes, I would say that writing this memoir was cathartic.

NB: Is there a silver lining to the cloud of a decade spent in a state-owned munitions factory--meaning, do you feel that you learned something from that experience that you may not have learned elsewhere?

LZ: Trapped for a decade at a factory was a bit too long. Yet, there's always a silver lining: it toughened me up. I guess it turned me into a fighter since for every little step I've made in my life, I had to fight for it.

NB: As a young adult, you dreamed of being a writer. Now that you are one, what is the best part about fulfilling this dream? Is there any part of your job that you find unsavory or difficult?

LZ: For me, there's something deeply satisfying and intensely pleasurable about writing. The best part is when people - especially those who are not my personal friends - tell me how much they love my work. I have just returned from a very successful book tour in the US where I enjoyed an enthusiastic response to my book and incredible hospitality from strangers. It was a morally uplifting experience.

NB: From my reading, it appears that Westernization occupies a rather dominant place in your work. Do you have the same impression? How do you feel about Westernization in China?

LZ: In this book, I also tried to explore the impact of western culture. China was isolated for so long. Once it opened up, I, like many young people, enthusiastically embraced western culture. I loved to wear bright western clothes. Now, I prefer to wear stylish Chinese-style clothes. In some ways, the growing westernization in China is part of globalization, but as China is growing stronger and more assertive, people are picking and choosing the best from both cultures.

NB: You clearly write a lot for English-language audiences. Do you also publish work in Chinese?

LZ: China's fast growing economy and its rising position in the world demand understanding. I feel there's need for people like me who have the inside into the culture and who are also able to communicate with those on the outside. That's how I see the role I can play best. I do write occasionally for Chinese publications.

A Writer Takes the Stage: Jonathan Spence’s Lectures, Part 1

Jonathan Spence’s elegant writing and his creative efforts to test the limits of standard genres of historical presentation have secured him a special status within both the interdisciplinary field of Chinese studies and the American historical profession. His reputation—as many or perhaps even all readers of this blog know—is based primarily on a string of successful books. These range widely in format, running the gamut from slim volumes that try to bring to life obscure or famous figures from the Chinese past to a large textbook. And while most of his publications focus on events and individuals of the opening centuries of rule by the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), he also shows great temporal range, as he has written compellingly about both earlier and later periods as well. But even though it is his writing that has earned him most of his many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and election to a term as President of the American Historical Association, the special series of “China Beat” posts on Spence that I am using this piece to introduce will not focus on what he has written but what he has said. We will focus on the writer as orator, in other words, looking at lectures he has given at Yale University, where has taught since the 1960s, and ones that are currently being aired on British radio, as Spence serves as the latest in a sixty-year line of BBC “Reith Lecturers,” the first of whom was Bertrand Russell.

Spence’s ability to hold an audience’s attention and enlighten his listeners has been well known for some time, albeit within a smaller circle than were aware of his gifts as a writer. His modern Chinese history undergraduate survey at Yale, which he offered for the last time this spring, has for decades been one of the most popular classes offered at that New Haven campus. It has routinely boasted enrollment levels in the hundreds, and at one point, at least according to what I heard on a recent visit to Yale, had close to a thousand students sign up for it in a single semester. Having been lucky enough to sit in on one session of the class back in the early 1980s, when I was visiting graduate schools trying to decide where to go, I can easily understand why the course drew the crowds it did. I don’t remember the topic he lectured on that day, as it was over a quarter-of-a-century ago, but I do recall finding the presentation inspiring. It was thus no surprise when, passing through New Haven a few weeks back, one thing that several people wanted to tell me about was what a special moment it had been when, just before I arrived in town, Spence had given his last lecture ever for that famous course.

Readers of this blog who want to know additional things abut Spence’s Yale survey course and its recent ending will get a chance to learn much more from a memoir that Susan Jakes is writing for China Beat as part of this series. And she will bring a distinctive perspective to the topic, as someone who took the course as a Yale undergrad and then, after doing various things (including writing for Time in China), came back as a graduate student and served as a teaching assistant for a later version of the same class. Most of the entries to come, though, will concentrate on Spence’s lectures to an audience larger than even the biggest classrooms at Yale can hold. That is, they will discuss his “Reith Lectures,” two of which have already been broadcast and another pair of which will air soon.

I should note that Spence has ties to many of us at this blog. There are people other than Jakes who have taken courses with him, served as his T.A., or done both of these things. Kate Merkel-Hess studied with him as an undergrad, for example, and Ken Pomeranz did so as a doctoral student. Other involved in China Beat, myself included, have benefited in other ways from his advice and support, whether in the form of blurbs on the back covers or positive reviews of our books he has published, or via suggestions he has made about our work. This series, though, will strive to be more than an uncritical tribute, for we will invite a different commentator to weigh in on each of his lectures and expect those who write these guest posts to offered varied mixes of appreciation and critique.

Going back to the written word, for a moment, I want to end with a personal and topical postscript about one of Spence’s most enduringly popular books, The Death of Woman Wang. It is a very special work to me, since had I not been assigned it as an undergraduate, in one of my first college history classes, I might not be teaching Chinese history today. It made a deep impression on me then, due to the care with which it sought to evoke the rhythms of daily life in a far-off place and time, and the innovative use Spence makes in it of fictional materials and devices. I was also struck by the emphasis it placed on a woman’s experiences at a time when most of the historical works I was reading still focused nearly exclusively on men. It is a book I’ve re-read often. Usually I do this because of a class: I’ve assigned it to undergraduates in general surveys, used it in upper division seminars on women in Chinese history, and taught it in a graduate class I gave her at UC Irvine on “Historical Writing,” as well as in a graduate class I co-taught with Deidre Lynch at Indiana University on “History and Fiction.” But once I revisited it because of something I was writing or rather co-writing with China Beat’s Susan Brownell: the “Introduction” to Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities, a book that she and I co-edited.

I’ve just realized that I now need to re-read it yet again, and this time for an all too topical reason. This is because the book opens with an account of the physical, psychological and social toll that an earthquake took centuries ago on a region whose inhabitants included the eponymous Woman Wang. The first chapter in this book—which first appeared in the United States almost exactly 30 years to the day before the ground began to shake so violently in Sichuan earlier this year (its official publication date was May 15, 1978)—begins with the following evocatively worded account of a long ago catastrophe that has a straight-from-the-headlines feel when re-read in 2008: “The earthquake struck T’an-ch’eng on July 25, 1688. There was no warning, save for the frightening roar that seemed to come from somewhere in the northwest. The buildings in the city began to shake and the trees took up a rhythmical swaying, tossing ever more wildly back and forth until their tips almost touched the ground.”

The Dirt on China Reporting

By Pierre Fuller

Reporting China for a Western readership gets a whole lot easier once you master the discursive montage of cheap China associations. When discussing the Chinese state, for example, plug in Orwell. When referencing anything in the period 1949-1976, plug in Mao. If, say, your topic is changing environmental behavior among the Chinese, ascribe it only to orders from the “new emperors” above; national pride could also do. And so on. A recent International Herald Tribune and New York Times website report, “Smoke Clears, Dust Does Not in Beijing,” follows the formula to a T.

In it, Mao makes his first appearance as the explanation for Beijing’s sooty sky. His “vision” for China, we learn, produced the many smokestacks belching out pollutants into the capital. “Mao got his wish,” the report continues, “everybody else got a persistent cough.” In other words, constructing heavy industry (i.e. capital goods) across China in the past was a single man’s project – and resulted in anything from cancer and climate change to an eyesore of a skyline, but not in the industrial foundation for the production of consumer goods that propels China in world stature today. But the thrust of the article is that this type of pollution, curbed for the Olympics, has been replaced by dust from the growing Gobi desert, which sweeps past where Beijing’s old city gates were “demolished by Mao and other visionaries.” This is our second Mao in a short report, and our second variant on the word “vision.” Note that when “vision” or its variants is used in the Chinese context, one must often read rash “delusion.” I suppose this journalist thought of conveniently balancing or bookending his piece with the odious constructions and familiar destructions of a favorite media character. Finally, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, or Bocog, is said to sport “an Orwellian acronym that suggests James Bond’s more ambitious villains.” For their nefarious ends, I hadn’t realized Bond villains ever looked to beautifying a city.

In Beijing, we are told, “dust never sleeps.” Neither, it seems, does the China cliché.

Liu Si (6/4)--Part 2, Looking Forward

This is the second part of our commemoration of Liu Si. Here, instead of looking backward (though some links include information about the past), our focus is on the present and the future. We point our readers to pieces that take up the contemporary meaning of the 1989 protests and the crackdown that followed, or assess the current state of Tiananmen-related issues, such as patterns of protest and human rights.

1. The latest issue of China Rights Forum, a publication of Human Rights in China, is titled "June 4/2008" and combines retrospective and forward-looking materials. All of the poem, essays, and calls to action it contains are available in their entirety online, as are its useful FAQ and "Resource List" sections.

2. A thoughtful and comprehensive look at the state of civil society and patterns of urban protest in contemporary China--two topics that attracted a great deal of attention in 1989 and continue to generate important discussion within and beyond Chinese studies--is "Political and Social Reform in China: Alive and Walking," which appears in the latest issue of the Washington Quartlery. It is co-written by George G. Gilboy and Benjamin L. Read (the latter of whom was interviewed by China Beat's Angilee Shah back in February).

3. There have been many attempts to compare and contrast the "Tiananmen Generation" of Chinese youth to those of later years--a particularly interesting recent one is Chris Buckley's just-out report for Reuters, "China's '08 Generation Finds a Voice in Tumultuous Times."

4. A view from Hong Kong, which is still the only part of the PRC where open discussion of June 4 is allowed and commemorations for the martyrs of 1989 routinely occurs, is provided by Emily Lau, a legislator based in the SAR, in her openDemocracy essay on "Tiananmen, 1989-2008."

5. This year, not surprisingly, some efforts have been made to relate the earthquake and related current issues to the traumas of 1989, with a particularly noteworthy case in point being comments by Bao Tong, a former high-ranking official who remains under house arrest because of his outspoken stance on Tiananmen. For his remarks and links to interviews with both Bao and "Tiananmen Mothers" leader Ding Zilin, see this post by Rebecca MacKinnon.

Liu Si: Part 1—Looking Backward

Today marks the nineteenth anniversary of the massacre in central Beijing of protesters (who had been calling for an end to official corruption and greater political openness) and onlookers (who had turned out to support the demonstrators or simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time)--liu si, literally "6/4," the Chinese shorthand for the Beijing Massacre of June 4, 1989 (we don't refer to as the "Tiananmen Massacre" for a reason, namely, because the main killing fields were near but not actually on the Square).

In honor of the occasion, China Beat will provide two different sorts of lists of five. The first, offered here, is made up of links that provide a window onto the past, offering perspectives on and information about what happened in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989 and in the scores of other cities where major protests by students and workers took place.

The second, to follow soon, will be comprised of links that offer illumination on contemporary commemorations of June 4th or on the current state of issues associated with Tiananmen, such as patterns of protest and how generations of youths are defined and see themselves.

We’d encourage anyone interested in either of these two lists to turn as well to the superb collection of links provided yesterday (when the anniversary had already arrived in China) by one of our favorite blogs.

Looking backward:

1. One of the best general online sources for information is a website created to accompany “The Gate of Heavenly of Peace,” Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s award-winning documentary on 1989. It includes a transcript of the film, some internal links to full-text background reading, and many other things.

2. There are several excellent document collections that provide translations of wall posters and manifestos from the time, but one of the very best and classroom-friendly is Cries for Democracy.

3. The book and film mentioned above focus on Beijing, like most works dealing with China’s 1989, but for important events that occurred in many other urban settings, one of the few major works in English is The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces. And it does not ignore Beijing by any means, including as it does political scientist Tony Saich’s blow-by-blow account of developments in the capital as well as a lively and insightful first-person account of developments on the Square by recent China Beat guest-poster Geremie Barmé.

4. For those interested in social science approaches to collective action, Craig Calhoun’s Neither Gods nor Emperors is well worth checking out. It was written by a leading sociologist who, though not a China specialist, was on the scene and provides a thoughtful and sophisticated look at what transpired.

5. Finally, though there were important differences between what happened in China in 1989 and what happened in Central and Eastern Europe that year, there were also enough connections and similarities to make it worth including one link that deals with events such as the Fall of the Berlin Wall. A special tenth anniversary of 1989 issue of Index on Censorship, which includes a couple of pieces on China but mostly concentrates on Europe, is a good place to start.

China: Democracy, or Confucianism?

by Xujun Eberlein

Last October, when the CCP held its 17th congress, CNN reported the event with the headline "China rules out copying Western democracy." My first reaction to this headline was, So what? That spontaneous reaction might have been an unconscious consequence of my reading Political Confucianism by Jiang Qing (蒋庆), a contemporary Confucian in China. In this book, Jiang Qing draws a blueprint for China's political future based on Confucianism. It is the first such conception since the 1919 May 4th movement that denounced the traditional Chinese ideology as a feudal relic and began the age-old country's modernization efforts.

It seems typical of American thinking to regard either a republic or parliamentary democracy as absolutely the only right model for all countries. For a political system to succeed, however, it needs to be rooted in the particular country's cultural history. Throughout thousands of years, China has never lacked great thinkers, political or philosophical. Which poses an interesting question: why does China need to adopt a Western model for its political system, be it Marxist communism or capitalist democracy?

But it is true that China hasn't had a great folk thinker like Confucius for quite some time. Especially in the communist regime, there has been no soil for such a thinker to grow. This frozen ground seems to have begun thawing lately. Jiang Qing's Confucian orthodox thoughts, at least, have not been subjected to suppression yet.

Among the contemporary Chinese scholars actively seeking solutions for their country's future, Jiang Qing is exceptional in that he investigated various philosophic schools and ideologies before embracing Confucianism. As a 20-year-old soldier in the 1970s, with a mere middle school education, he had taken a stab at Marx's voluminous Capital. In 1980, an undergraduate student in Southwest Politics and Law College, he was the first in the country to criticize Chinese Communist practice as having abandoned the humanitarian essence of Marx's early works. His self-assigned, hand-written thesis "Return to Marx" spread apace in many universities, and brought him years of political trouble.

In his early 30s, Jiang Qing's political predicament drove him first to existentialism and then Buddhism. After his visit to the Shaolin Temple in 1984, he shut himself up on Chongqing's Gele Mountain for four years to study Buddhist scriptures, eventually concluding that Buddhism solves the "life and death" issue on the individual level, but provides inadequate guidance for national political problems. Later he would find that, unlike Buddhism that teaches detachment from the dusty real world, Confucianism has a long tradition of involvement in political construction, and that would become the breakthrough point in Jiang Qing's theoretical exploration.

Jiang Qing had also turned to Christianity, and translated several English books into Chinese, including James Reid's Facing Life with Christ and Louis Proal's Political Crime. He was deeply moved by Jesus's spirit and attempted several times to join a Christian church in Shenzhen. However, his attempts would not come to fruition as he felt "the entire Chinese culture dragging my leg." (Miwan: "Biography of Sensei Jiang Qing," unpublished manuscript in Chinese)

After all this exploration, only Confucianism makes him feel that he is at home and embracing his destiny. This is not because Confucius, some 500 years older than Jesus, had 72 disciples while Jesus had only 12; it is simply that cultural background has an indelible impact on one's ideological choice.

In 2001, 48-year-old Jiang Qing quit his college teaching job and established a Confucian seminary in the remote mountains of Guizhou. For three seasons of the year, except winter, Jiang Qing dresses in the traditional long buttoned shirt, studies and teaches Confucianism in the mountains without electricity or a cell phone signal, and pushes a nation-wide "children reading Confucian classics" movement.

Since 1989, Jiang Qing has published several scholarly books. Political Confucianism, available in Chinese only, was published, with partial sponsorship from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, in 2004 by SDX Joint Publishing in Beijing. It has not been banned, though I couldn't find it in China's bookstores during my visit last year. (The copy I read was lent to me by a friend.) On the other hand, Jiang Qing's plan to publish a collection of recent articles and speeches on Political Confucianism was rejected this year, because the book did not pass the publishing house's "political examination."

In his books and articles on Political Confucianism, Jiang Qing calls for a restoration of Confucianism as the state ideology, as it had been in many dynasties. Further, he outlines a Confucian political structure strongly distinct from both Soviet-style communism and Western-style democracy.

Democracy is Westernized and imperfect in nature, Jiang Qing points out. If applied to China, a western style democratic system would have only one legitimacy – popular will, or civil legitimacy. Such uni-legitimacy operates on the quantity of votes, regardless of the moral implications of decisions taken. Since human desire is selfish by nature, those decisions can be self serving for a particular majority's interest. Because of this, Jiang Qing argues, civil legitimacy alone is not sufficient to build or keep a constructive social order.

The uni-legitimacy criticism makes senses to me because western countries, which have evolved the concepts of sufferance, law, tolerance and community standards over hundreds of years, have a broad base for governance. China, on the other hand, does not have this same evolution. Western democracy simply dropped onto China is likely to face pitfalls parallel to those seen in Iraq. The foundation of majority rule alone is not sufficient to provide good governance.

In contrast, the Confucian state Jiang proposes is tri-legitimate: it carries numinous, historical, and civil legitimacy simultaneously. In particular, the governmental body consists of three mutually constraining institutions that represent religion (members chosen through community recommendation and Confucian examination), cultural tradition (members based on sovereign and sage lineage and by appointment), and popular will (members elected), respectively. Jiang Qing believes that such a structure would avoid many of the mistakes that appear inevitable under a uni-legitimate system.

The above ideas can be traced back to a Confucian concept: "The sovereign rules through the heaven, the earth, and the people." The Chinese had thousands of years of tradition with these elements in their political systems, and of all the great ancient cultures, China is unique in having survived with recognizable continuity.

Jiang Qing’s idea of political Confucianism has found as many advocates as dissenters. Followers honor him as "the greatest contemporary Confucian," while dissenters accuse him of being a “benighted cultural conservative.” Jiang Qing says he accepts both titles without the modifiers.

The website of China Daily, a government-run English newspaper, published an article on January 6, 2006 titled "Confucianism will never be religion [sic]." It concludes, "Religion as a state power, as Jiang advocates, should never be allowed, not in this country."

Chen Lai, China’s top Confucianism scholar and professor of philosophy at Beijing University, welcomes the new departure in political Confucianism research conducted by Jiang Qing. In fact, he helped to have Political Confucianism published. Still, he considers the suggestion that Confucianism become the state ideology, let alone a basis for government, impractical. In my chat with Chen Lai when he visited Harvard University last spring, he shook head at the theology that does not separate state and church.

On the other hand, Daniel A. Bell, an Oxford-educated Canadian scholar and professor of philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, deems that "it is not entirely fanciful to surmise that the Chinese Communist Party will be relabeled the Chinese Confucian Party in a few years time."

There is in fact a sign that China's current leaders have begun to encourage the revival of Confucianism. President Hu Jingtao has alluded to Confucius' teaching in various speeches – a gesture toward the return to traditional value that was not seen in his predecessors. This tendency was again displayed in CCP's 17th Congress.

It is a welcome change, displaying a small degree of tolerance that has been lacking. But it is a far cry from the Confucian state proposed by Jiang Qing.

Last summer in Beijing I had a conversation with Miwan, a disciple and friend of Jiang Qing's and a professor himself in a renowned Chinese university. When asked what he thought of the feasibility of Jiang Qing's ideal, Miwan said, "To a great thinker, feasibility does not have to be an immediate concern. Sensei Jiang is a great thinker." All of Jiang's disciples and followers reverently refer to him as "Jiang xiansheng" – sensei Jiang, whether in front of or behind him. This is a practice of the Confucian "respecting the teacher, valuing the tao" tradition, in sharp contrast to the behavior of today's irreverent young generation. To a Chinese history addict like me, the reappearance of this long-abandoned reverence for a teacher is heart warming.

In an email to me later, Miwan summarizes his association with Jiang Qing by using a classic phrase, "Though unreachable, my heart longs."

After Jiang Qing returned his home in Shenzhen for winter last year, I emailed him asking what he was busy on. He replied, "Reading all day long, nothing more." I asked what he thought of the potential for Confucianism to become the state ideology. "I'm not optimistic," he said, "I'm afraid it might have to wait for several decades."

Well, that is optimistic.

Xujun Eberlein is the author of Apologies Forthcoming and blogs regularly at Inside-Out China, which also contains links to her webpage.

The Forbidden City by Barmé—Don’t Leave for the “Great Within” Without It

“I think there's a lack of books that serious, educated non-specialists can pick up…I've read a lot of great books recently by academics but few that I could recommend, say, to my father.”
These lines come from an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Ian Johnson that “China Beat” ran at the end of January, back when our site was still young (now that we’ve been going for more than a third-of-a-year, we hardly count as youthful anymore, so quickly does the blogosphere change). He was responding to a question Nicole Barnes had put to him about what he’d like to see more of from academics in Chinese studies, and he went on to specify that the problem lay primarily in how much jargon popped up in scholarly publications—though I suspect that he also might have been thinking about stodgy writing but was too polite to add that.
Well, Ian, I hope you're reading this, as I have some good news, which may be especially welcome with Father’s Day coming up soon: Harvard University Press has released the U.S. edition of Geremie Barmé’s The Forbidden City, and it's just what the doctor ordered. It's a wonderfully readable, smart look at "The Great Within" (as the Forbidden City's sometimes called), which is jargon free and definitely non-specialist friendly.

It's also anything but stodgy. There are tales of court intrigue. And even a racy extract from a unpublished early-twentieth-century work by the renowned and then later reviled "displaced Cornish aristocrat Edmund Trelawny Backhouse," a famous Sinologist and forger, who claimed to have had erotic encounters with Empress Dowager Ci Xi, one of the most infamous residents of the Forbidden City, though, as Barmé notes, her reputation is not quite as bad these days among scholars as it once was.

The Forbidden City, tells intellectually curious tourists, as well as those with more specialized concerns (scholars, journalists, or, say, someone with a son who covers China for a major American newspaper) everything they might want to know about Beijing's biggest and most storied landmark. First published by Profile Books in the U.K. a few months back, it's short and beautifully packaged, with nice photographs and drawings inside and different but equally classy covers on each
edition. And it doesn’t require having a copy of the OED handy (to look up esoteric terms) or a doctoral degree under your belt (to figure out the theories invoked). Perhaps Barmé’s most accessible work to date, it still contains the mix of wit and erudition that China specialists have come to expect from all of his writings.

In a minute, I’ll have some additional things to say about what I learned from and like about The Forbidden City. I’ll also explain why I’m not a completely unbiased fan of the book, which is the first China-themed publication in a great series called “Wonders of the World” that is the brainchild of the multitalented Mary Beard, a prolific scholar of the ancient Mediterranean who among many other things writes a popular blog, “A Don’s Life,” that’s hosted by the Times Literary Supplement or TLS, for which she serves as Classics editor. Before getting to those things, though, I want to digress and talk about a recently deceased cinematic celebrity who has a curious link to the Forbidden City’s place within Western popular culture. No, I’m not thinking of Bernardo Bertulucci of “The Last Emperor” fame—as he’s still alive and well, as far as I know. I mean, instead, Charlton Heston.

What exactly does this actor who died in early April have to do with the Beijing landmark that was home to figures like Last Emperor Pu Yi and Ci Xi? If all you went by the obituaries I’ve come across, you might be tempted to answer: Nothing. These overviews of the life and career of the actor-turned-anti-gun-control-activist typically focus on Heston’s political activities (from his youthful left-of-center leanings to the abrupt right turn that made him a spokesman for the National Rifle Association) and the parts he played in films that won awards (“Ben Hur”), inspired sequels (“Planet of the Apes”), or made an indelible mark on the American psyche (the cannibalistic classic “Soylent Green”). What I associate with Heston’s name above all, however, is “55 Days at Peking,” in which the Empress Dowager is memorably portrayed as an embodiment of pure evil. It’s the only Heston movie I’ve watched more than once, as well as the only one I've shown excerpts from to students.

I was disappointed, but hardly surprised, by the decision that obituary writers made to skip over this 1963 release that deals with what’s generally called the Boxer “Rebellion”—a somewhat problematic term, as many readers of this blog know, since the anti-Christian insurgents involved were odd sorts of “rebels,” often expressing support for and sometimes being backed by the Qing Dynasty. Bringing the film into their Heston obituaries would have allowed the obit writers to point out that this movie gave the actor a chance to share the screen with Ava Gardner, who played his Russian love interest, and with the dapper David Niven, who played a British participant in the multinational group that saved the day by defeating the Boxers. It would also have let them point out that, like James Dean, Heston once took direction from Nicholas Ray, who was best known not for “55 Days at Peking” but for a very different sort of “rebellion” picture: “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Still, the oversight was natural enough. It's true that the film is still shown from time to time on cable television stations, presumably because of their desire to cater to war-buffs and history-buffs who don’t mind it when a picture runs a bit long, as this one does, and has patches of dialogue and scenery that seem a bit cheesy, to put it kindly. But “55 Days at Peking” is of much more interest now to Sinologists than to cineastes and probably holds most appeal of all to those intrigued by the many ways that Cold War politics put their stamp on mid-to-late 20th century representations of historical developments. It is no accident, for instance, that American military man Heston and Niven’s main Japanese counterpart in the multinational anti-Boxer force comes off much better in the film than does their main Russian ally.

Even though I wasn’t surprised that obituaries ignored the film, I definitely would have been surprised if had Barmé had left “55 Days at Peking” out of his new book. After all, some of the film’s action takes place in the Forbidden City—or, rather, in a Madrid mock-up of this site (the real thing wouldn’t be the setting for a big budget foreign feature film until Bertolucci used it to such powerful effect in the 1980s). And Barmé’s not the kind of person to shy away from mixing scholarship with pop culture savvy, as shown, for example, by his allusion to a Hollywood film involving puppets in his scathing China Journal review of Mao: The Unknown Story.

Moreover, openness to mixing pop playfulness with serious points about famous landmarks has always been an appealing feature of the “Wonders of the World” series. This was demonstrated in The Parthenon, the first book in the series. Written by Beard, it opens with an amusing quotation involving Shaquille O’Neal (asked by a reporter if he went to "The Parthenon" while in Greece, he allegedly responded that he'd been to so many clubs that he couldn't remember all their names) and discusses a computer game inspired by the Elgin Marbles controversy.

Having just finished The Forbidden City—fittingly enough on a plane flight to Athens, en route to a conference on the upcoming Beijing Games, convened at the International Olympic Academy in ancient Olympia—I’m happy to report that “55 Days at Peking” is indeed one of the many Great Within-related texts that Barmé dissects. And, better yet, after reading his account, I’ll never again look at the movie, which I thought I knew well already, in quite the same way. I learned new things about the previous roles played by one of its stars: the actress who did such a diabolical turns as the Empress Dowager had previously channeled Catherine the Great on screen. And while I was aware before of the liberties the film took with historical actors (the Boxers come off a lot like the villains in old Cowboys and Indians Westerns), I’m now much clearer about the specific changes it made to the physical and sacred geography of Beijing (placing buildings that are actually far apart right by one another and so forth).

More importantly—as I realize the Heston film is a personal obsession of mine that is not necessarily shared by all readers of Barmé’s book, or this blog, for that matter—“55 Days at Peking” is only one of a long list of things on which The Forbidden City sheds new light. The book is filled with insightful comments about art and architecture and about how China’s politically tumultuous mid-to-late twentieth century affected what was done in and to the Forbidden City, a topic previously explored in an illuminating fashion in a special issue of a Barmé-edited online journal, The China Heritage Quarterly. It also contains a wonderful chapter that, drawing with full acknowledgement upon a very special Chinese book on the subject, tries to recreate the activities of a Qing Emperor on a “typical” day.

As I said before, though without explanation then, I came to the book as a far from impartial reader. Not only are Barmé and Beard both friends, but I actually put the latter in touch with the former when she mentioned looking for someone to do a China book for her series. (I can acknowledge that with pride now, having seen how well my foray into serving as a comprador of the publishing world worked out—and because Barmé is nice enough to mention it himself in the book’s “Acknowledgements” section.) But it is hard for me to imagine how anyone interested in Beijing, whether casually or for professional reasons, could come away from this book unimpressed—even if they had never before even heard of the Australian author, let alone read earlier noteworthy works of his, such as Shades of Mao, In The Red, and An Artistic Exile.

The Forbidden City is, finally, a book of great value even to those who care far less about Chinese buildings than they do about Chinese politics, and more about the contemporary scene than about Qing history. This is because, along with its other virtues, it provides, via comments scattered throughout its pages, the best account I’ve seen to date of an enduringly important and complex present-day political issue. Namely, the parallels but also the crucial contrasts between the modes of rule and styles of life of Mao and other Communist Party leaders, on the one hand, and imperial rulers and emperor wannabes like Warlord Yuan Shikai, on the other.

I don't know if any journalist will actually end up giving this book to a father for Father’s Day this year--or a mother for Mother’s Day next May. But I do know that, because of its nuanced handling of issues such as that just mentioned, it should be required reading for any journalist bound for Beijing.