Wild Strawberries

The past week has witnessed the appearance of the Wild Strawberries Student Movement (野草莓學運; see website), formed in the aftermath of state attempts to curtail peaceful expressions of free speech during the visit of ARATS Chairman Chen Yunlin 陳雲林. These actions prompted over 200 students to launch a sit-in outside the Executive Yuan, and after being evicted from their original location the students transferred the sit-in to Liberty Plaza (自由廣場). They have received petitions of support from over 500 university professors, while other sit-ins have been staged throughout the island.

At this point in time, the movement's goals include: 1) Apologies from President Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 and Premier Liu Chao-shiuan 劉兆玄; 2) The resignations of National Police Agency Director-General Wang Cho-chiun 王卓鈞 and National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Chao-ming 蔡朝明; 3) Amending the Parade and Assembly Law (集會遊行法) by removing an article that obliges rally organizers to apply for police approval prior to staging an event.

The students have had to cope with a wide range of "tests", including bad weather, midterms, convincing politcal figures not to take part, and coping with the occasional oddball trying to take advantage of the sit-in to make her or his own statement. Whether this movement will be as successful as the Wild Lily Student Movement (野百合學運) of the 1990s remains to be seen. The number of participants has been relatively low, but both the ruling and opposition parties have responded positively to the possibility of amending the Parade and Assembly Law. However, there has as yet been no response to student insistence on apologies and resignations. Student protests have always been a thorn in side of Chinese governments, be they imperial dynasties, authoritarian states, or democracies; it will be interesting to see how things progress.

In other news...

1. An 80 year-old former KMT party member attempted self-immolation near the sit-in to protest heavy-handed police actions against protesters carrying the ROC flag at sites Chen Yunlin was visiting. He is hanging on to life in the Taiwan University Hospital ICU.

2. Former President Chen Shuibian 陳水扁 has been placed in detention following 6 hours of questioning at the prosecutor's office and a marathon 11-hour detention hearing interrupted by a trip to the hospital to investigate Chen's claims that he had been roughed up by court bailiffs (doctors determined that he had only suffered a minor muscle tear). The hearing concluded with the judges voting 2-1 in favor of detention on grounds that Chen might tamper with evidence against him.

This action marks the temporary conclusion of a formal investigation into allegations of corruption by Chen that began on May 20, the date of Ma's inauguration. He is now the tenth person being detained in connection with the case. As Chen was led out from the prosecutor's office, he put his handcuffed hands in the air and shouted "Political persecution! Long live Taiwan!" He has only drunk water during first day of his detention, which suggests that he may be initiating a hunger strike.

3. Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen 蘇治芬 is persisting with a hunger strike to protest her detention on charges of corruption. She is now being kept alive through a court-ordered IV drip. For a moving letter she wrote to her son, click here.

Here are some aspects of what penal detention in Taiwan entails: up to four months confinement in a small cell with just one hour of exercise per day, a rectal examination each time one re-enters the cell block (to prevent the smuggling of contraband), etc...all without having been formally indicted, not to mention convicted of a crime. To be clear: for centuries (if not millennia) corruption has been a scourge of civilization. Politicians guilty of such crimes deserve to be locked up in a dank and dark dungeon...but only following a conviction resulting from a fair trial. One should also note that while corruption cases in Taiwan have been quite common over the years, it is relatively rare for accused politicians to be subjected to detention. There are increasing fears that Taiwan's reputation as being governed by the rule of law is being eroded, and it might be worth considering this recent comment by AIT Director Stephen M. Young (楊甦棣): "The only thing I would say (about the Chen case) is that not only Taiwan, but your friends around the world would be watching the process very closely. And we believe it needs to be transparent, fair and impartial."

Like the student sit-ins, protests against the above-mentioned detentions have been relatively limited in size (celebrations over Chen's detention have also been muted). Some people may be disgusted by the moral decline of DPP politicians, while others may be intimidated by recent wave of detentions. All in all, however, it seems that most people are just too busy trying to make ends meet to engage in acts of protest. However, recent events have led to a sense of sorrow and frustration...and only six months after the new government was sworn in. Let us hope for a brighter future.

Note: In the interests of sustaining a harmonious blogosphere, all references to Taiwan as a country or nation have been omitted from this post.

Coming Distractions: Two Kinds of Time

By Robert A. Kapp

The first big crush of incipient China specialists after World War II marched into America’s graduate schools in the early and mid-1960s, particularly after the enactment of the National Defense Education Act made large amounts of federal money available for “Foreign Area Studies” and “Critical Language Studies.”

I was one of the marchers. Having finished college, with virtually no exposure to anything Asian, in the spring of 1964, I began six long years of graduate study that fall. The new life began at 8 a.m. on, I think, September 22, in my first language class: Chinese I. It was a helpful day; even now, whenever someone Chinese tells me how good my Chinese is, I blurt out my first teacher’s first injunction: always reply, “Wo jiu hui jiang jiju hua” (I can only speak a few words).

Our generation is now “senior,” in the way that, for us, John Fairbank and George Taylor and Martin Wilbur and, slightly younger, Arthur and Mary Wright and Doak Barnett and John Lindbeck and others were “senior” when we were barely starting. Now, at least one highly accomplished member of my academic generation is soon to publish his own informative and entertaining memoirs.

Most of us studied in Taiwan under KMT military rule in the late sixties (access to the PRC was nonexistent), then made our first trips to the PRC in the mid-seventies, either shortly before or shortly after Mao’s death. We see China through the lenses of decades of contact with the PRC.

I think I’m probably not alone in feeling powerful links to my own past in the China field, but also to the past that just pre-dated my arrival – the past of my mentors’ experience, the past that held the powerful, gripping encounter of America and China during and after World War II, the past that saw the US-China confrontation in Korea and the political convulsions over Sino-American relations in both countries.

I sometimes envy young, bright MBAs from good U.S. schools who choose China instead of Dubai or Milan or Singapore for their next assignment; who arrive in China with little or no background on the country; and who are thus free to see China as it is in real time, with few referents from even the recent past. But, on balance, I think that the perspective of time really does matter tremendously, and hope that some of the newest generations of Americans to encounter China can gain something for tomorrow from yesterday’s legacy.

With all that in mind, I recently encouraged the University of Washington Press to reprint my favorite China book of all time, Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time, originally published in 1950. UW has now brought the book out, in paperback. Pieces of my modest Foreword to this new edition follow here.

Bringing Peck to new audiences, six decades after his great book appeared, is, for me, a labor of love. The books offers tremendous food for thought – about China then and now, radically changed and perhaps in some ways hardly changed at all; about the American experience with China, then and now; about Americans themselves, their politics, their sense of place in the world.

Above all, Two Kinds of Time is a masterpiece of writing, and of illustration. I’ll let the Foreword speak for itself, but I hope that visitors to The China Beat will be intrigued enough by what they see online to get hold of the book, think about where we have been as they ponder where we’re going -- and above all get a sense of what great American writing about China really can be. We’re entering a new Golden Age of writing about China, in my view, and dear Graham Peck, who died in obscurity as I labored through graduate school only a hundred and fifty miles from his Vermont home, unaware yet of his existence, offers a standard for the best of our contemporary observers to emulate.

Two Kinds of Time
(Excerpts from the Foreword by Robert A. Kapp)

It gives me great joy to celebrate the reappearance of the best book on China that I have ever read, Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time, nearly six decades after its original publication. This book is at once hilarious and horrifying, heart-warming and heart-breaking, educational and entertaining. Peck’s writing, and his talent as an illustrator, make for a unique book. The clarity of his vision, combined with the quietness of his voice, endow Two Kinds of Time with an enduring power.

I first encountered Two Kinds of Time in a rural New England used book shop in the summer of 1970. I had just finished graduate school, where I had done my research on conditions in West China in the years between the fall of the last dynasty, the Qing, in 1911 and the beginning of full-scale war with Japan in 1937. Two Kinds of Time picks up the story roughly from there, chronicling life in the “Great Rear Area” (those parts of central and West China still governed, however imperfectly, by the exiled Chinese Nationalist government), from the Japanese invasion to the end of the Pacific War in 1945.

**

Graham Peck, born in 1914, was raised in Connecticut and attended college at Yale, not far from his home. After graduation in 1935, he set out on a wanderjahr which he expected to finance by selling his drawings. He got as far as China, where he planned to stay for a few weeks but wound up staying for a couple of years. His delightful and evocative Through China’s Wall, chronicling his adventures during his first period in China, appeared in 1940. That year, he headed back to China for the sojourn that lasted through the end of the Second World War in the fall of 1945. Two Kinds of Time is his account of that long stay.

The China he re-entered in 1940 was three years into war with Japan. After six years of nibbling away at Chinese territories in northeastern China, starting with its seizure of Manchuria in 1931, Japan had marched into China proper in the summer of 1937. Over the next eighteen months, Japanese forces moved quickly southward and inland, seizing all the major eastern Chinese cities including Peking (now Beijing), Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), and Nanking (Nanjing), the city that had served as the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s National Government since 1927. As the occupation expanded up the Yangtse (Yangzi) River, a massive migration to the deep interior of China unfolded. The central government, which had first fled Nanking for the river city of Wuhan, six hundred miles inland from Shanghai, fled deeper into the interior in the fall of 1938. While the wartime exodus into southwest China had begun in 1937, the organs of Kuomintang (KMT) party and government authority, along with a mixed crowd of industrial, commercial, academic, and professional refugees, now settled down in Chungking (Chongqing), a dilapidated river metropolis in Szechuan (Sichuan) Province, another three hundred miles upriver and separated from Japanese-occupied territory by the impenetrable gorges of the Yangtze. Faculty and students—even libraries—of Chinese universities trekked inland from the sophisticated coastal cities to Chungking, the Szechuan capital of Chengtu (Chengdu), the Yunnan provincial capital of Kunming, and elsewhere in the unoccupied territories of the deep southwest.

By the time Peck made his way from the Kwangtung (Guangdong) coast near Hong Kong through Japanese-occupied lands into government-controlled territory in 1940, the Sino-Japanese war had stalemated. Peck entered a strange world of suspended animation. His observations and analysis of this odd environment are a cornerstone of his book’s value.

Once the United States was at war with Japan, China became not just a distant, victimized recipient of American sympathy but a wartime American ally. Moreover, as the Pacific War unfolded, Chiang Kai-shek’s Chungking regime rose, with American support, to become one of the “Big Four”—the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—whose alliance, according to American planners and propagandists, would win the war and configure the postwar world.

Peck stayed on the ground throughout the conflict. When he first arrived in wartime Nationalist territory in 1940, Americans were few and far between. Here, the narrative of Two Kinds of Time reads almost like a backpacker’s diary. Once the United States and China came together in wartime alliance against Japan, the size and scope of the American presence in unoccupied China changed radically. For the first time in history, thousands of ordinary Americans, in military service, moved into China, diplomatic contacts between the two countries intensified, and a heroic image of America’s Chinese ally, led by its towering leader Chiang Kai-shek, entered the American public consciousness. Peck himself went to work for the Office of War Information (OWI), one of the U.S. government’s earliest efforts to employ what is now called “public diplomacy.” Chungking, no longer assaulted by Japanese bombers from below the Yangtse Gorges as it had been earlier in Peck’s time there, filled up with GIs, American reporters, and visiting American dignitaries. The U.S. Air Force set up forward fighter bases and rear-area heavy bomber bases in occupied areas for potential use in the final destruction of the Japanese home islands. American media reportage on China grew exponentially, in quantity if not in quality. Political interactions between Chungking and Washington expanded. Peck watched, took notes, and wrote.

By the time Two Kinds of Time appeared in 1950, Peck’s wartime tale had become an elegy, and a bitter one at that. The civil war between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists, suspended in 1937, flickered back to life well before the Japanese surrender, and burst out fully immediately thereafter. Upon the Japanese surrender, the United States provided Chiang with crucial military and logistical support for his contest with the Communists, and continued to do so for most of the remainder of the Civil War. Washington, through General George Marshall, attempted unsuccessfully to mediate between Chiang and Mao Zedong in 1946 and 1947, and then watched as the Nationalist armies disintegrated and Chiang’s regime evacuated to Taiwan.

Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The accompanying political convulsion in the United States informs much of the second half of Two Kinds of Time. In the same year that the book appeared, U.S. and Chinese forces went into bloody battle in Korea. Writing with searing clarity of the collapse of an entire social system during the war years, Peck looked hopefully to a new and more just society in the new People’s Republic and reflected painfully on what he saw as America’s myopia in clinging to the discredited and defeated Nationalist regime.

Peck was twenty-six years old when he headed into China in 1940, and only thirty-one when he left after V-J Day in 1945. His experiences were those of a young man in a time and place where upheaval and uncertainty ruled. These are not the memoirs of a senior diplomat or a great statesman. They are the recordings of travels, of labors, and, above all, of encounters with people noble and base, wise and incredibly foolish.

China Annals: Elizabeth Perry

Elizabeth Perry of Harvard University is the outgoing president of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and the author of many books. She has also edited and co-edited nine books (one with China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom) which address issues of workers’ rights, popular protest, revolution, and reform. Last April, she delivered the presidential address at the Annual Meeting of the AAS in Atlanta, Georgia. In this address, which will appear in print in the November issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, she focused on the non-violent worker strike at the Anyuan coal mines in the early 1920s, and called for a more positive re-assessment of China’s twentieth-century revolutions. Nicole Barnes of The China Beat interviewed Dr. Perry about the content of her address and her current research.

Nicole Barnes: After serving your term as President of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), what direction do you see or would you like to see the Association moving in? What future challenges do you see the AAS having to overcome?

Elizabeth Perry: The AAS is a wonderful organization, the largest area studies association in existence and one that – unlike many scholarly associations these days – is continuing to grow and change. My hope is for still greater internationalization and diversification of the AAS membership. In particular, I would like to see more Asian-based members, younger members, and more members drawn from the social science disciplines and professions. As the terms of “intellectual trade” between America and Asia shift, with more influential scholarship being produced by our colleagues in Asia, it will be increasingly important for the AAS to identify, introduce and incorporate that work into our annual meeting program and our journal. The recent economic growth of China and India has generated considerable public interest in the prospect of an “Asian twenty-first century.” While we can never sacrifice the high academic standards for which our association is known, it is also important for us to find ways to make our knowledge of Asia more publicly accessible.

NB: Would you like to let our readers know about your upcoming book, and in what journal issue they may find a tantalizing piece of that work?

EP: The book I am currently writing is entitled, Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Traditions. The book will explore the early history of the labor movement at the Anyuan coal mine as well as the political uses of that history over the years by politicians, artists, writers, and ordinary Chinese citizens. In addition to the paper in the November 2008 JAS, I have published an article in Twentieth-Century China, which focuses on the Communists’ early efforts at mass education at Anyuan.

NB: Can you describe the intellectual and professional trajectory that led you to your topic for the presidential address?

EP: Most of my work has been concerned in one way or another with the Chinese revolution. My first book (Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China) focused on the countryside, looking at the relationship between “traditional” peasant rebellion and the Communist revolution. Subsequent books (Shanghai on Strike; Patrolling the Revolution; Proletarian Power) focused on the city of Shanghai, from the 1920s through the Cultural Revolution. The Communist mobilizing effort at the Anyuan coal mine had major implications for both the rural and urban wings of the Chinese revolution. Moreover, its history became highly contested during the Cultural Revolution. A study of Anyuan serves, I believe, as a revealing prism through which to understand the unfolding of the Chinese revolution.

NB: In your address, you mention several China scholars whose assessment of worker and peasant revolutions in China have changed drastically over the years. You include yourself among this list. What would you say you have learned about the successes and failures of revolutions in your scholarly career? How has your assessment of popular revolutions changed?

EP: Like many in my generation, I was initially drawn into the field of Asian studies because of a fascination with Asian revolutionary change – in both China and Vietnam. But after living in China as a visiting scholar for a year in 1979-80, I arrived at a more sober assessment of the Chinese revolution, especially as it developed under the PRC. My latest book, Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship and the Modern Chinese State, reflects that perspective. The current study of Anyuan has renewed some of my youthful admiration for the initial ideals of the Chinese revolution, while providing a vehicle for studying what went so wrong in its subsequent development.

Shanghai Expo: A Preview

We imagine that some of you are now emerging from your post-Olympic stupor and feeling capable of turning attention to the next Chinese mega-event: the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Here are a few places to check out to get up on Shanghai’s preparation for the Expo:

1. Start off with the official site, where you can meet mascot Haibao (the little blue guy with the Tintin hair to the right), watch promo videos, and find lists of participating countries and organizations.

2. The organizing group for the world Expos (the equivalent to the International Olympic Committee) is the Bureau International des Expositions. At the BIE’s website see lists and detailed information on previous Expos, the logos for coming Expos (such as the Expo that just occurred this summer in Zarazoga, Spain—seriously what is it with lumpy little blue men?), and browse photos from select Expos.

3. The U.S. is in danger of missing out on the Shanghai Expo—federal legislation passed a few years ago prevents the government from funding the exhibit, so the endeavor has to be privately funded. This is a piece on the American group bidding to host the U.S. pavilion.

4. China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom's forthcoming book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010, puts the Expo into historical perspective. my forthcoming book that places it into historical perspective. For a little insight into how he will frame the Expo historically, see this piece Wasserstrom wrote at History News Network.

5. Susan Fernsebner, who teaches in the history department at University of Mary Washington, recently published a historical piece on Chinese participation in early expos and an early expo held in China (available for those with access to Late Imperial China).

China in 2008: Cover Art

One of the themes in our forthcoming book, China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance, is how the year 2008 came to symbolize more than just the hosting of the Olympics in China. "2008" came to mean China's emergence on the world stage with the respect and admiration of people around the globe. When we saw this picture, taken by Shanghai-based photographer Iain Harral, it seemed to represent that fervent hope--so fervent that it was, in this case, literally written on the body. We're grateful to Iain for allowing us to use this photo on the cover of our forthcoming book. Once we have a final cover mock-up, we'll be sharing that here. In the meantime, we wanted to give you a peek at Iain's fabulous image.

State of Siege

The past few days in Taiwan have been marked by a mixture of joy and trepidation: joy at Obama's unprecedented electoral triumph and what it means for the achievement of justice and racial harmony (dare we hope that one day a Hakka or Aborigine may become President of Taiwan?), but also trepidation over the state of Taiwan's democratic system. Violent street protests accompanying the visit of Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin 陳雲林 have shocked and dismayed the nation, prompting the normally mild-mannered President Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 to pound the podium in rage while issuing a strong rebuke to those involved.

There is ample blame to go around for both the government and opposition, and especially for those opportunistic DPP politicians and other public figures who attempted to use the protests against Chen's visit to gain greater notoriety and/or enhance their prospects for winning future elections. At the same time, however, simply labeling the protests as the work of some sort of violent rabble overlooks the fact that many participants were law-abiding citizens deeply concerned about their country's future. To keep things in perspective, the pattern of largely peaceful protests dissolving into violence following the infiltration of gangsters and other anti-social elements also occurred following the Presidential Election of 2004 and the Depose Bian (倒扁) movement of 2006, the main difference being that the leaders of these protests were mostly members of the pan-blue camp or their sympathizers.

It is also essential to recognize that protests during the first two days of Chen's visit were largely peaceful. Many people agree with the need for enhanced contacts and mutual understanding across the Taiwan Strait, and the agreements signed during Chen's visit should benefit the citizens of China and Taiwan alike while aiding the cause of regional stability. Lengthy negotiations led to the signing of deals to introduce direct cargo shipping between 11 Taiwanese seaports and 63 in China, expand direct postal links, increase passenger flights from 36 to 108 while also allowing private business jet flights, shorten existing routes across the Taiwan Strait, and allow more mainland tourists to visit Taiwan. In the wake of the melamine scandals, closer cooperation was also promised on food safety issues, and both countries agreed to a wildlife swap, with China receiving a deer and a Formosa serow (an indigenous goat-like animal) in exchange for two pandas with names that when combined (團團 and 員員) symbolize a reunion.

There was also the symbolic importance of the meeting between Ma and Chen, which represented the highest level of contact between the two sides since 1949. Despite the fact that the meeting was moved forward five hours to avoid protestors and lasted a mere 5-7 minutes, with Chen declining to address Ma as "President", the fact that such a high-level encounter took place at all provides hope for the future.

Nonetheless, many people were dismayed by the mammoth security operation that accompanied Chen's visit. A cordon sanitaire was set up around all the sites that Chen visited, and attempts at peaceful protest inside the cordon were met with swift and decisive action. National flags were confiscated or their holders hustled away (see video), while people wearing "Taiwan is my country" T-shirts were stopped, questioned, and in some cases also ordered to leave. Perhaps the most disturbing scene occurred outside a music store located near one of the hotels where Chen was enjoying a banquet with some businessmen and KMT bigwigs. Videos of the incident (originally broadcast on the 東森 and 中天 networks) show people dancing in the streets to the sounds of the "Song of Taiwan", with the atmosphere being almost carnival-like...until a group of uniformed and plain-clothed policemen entered the store, instructed the owner to shut off its sound system, and attempted to close its doors. Apparently someone had filed a noise complaint, but loudness is a daily fact of life here and it is rare for the police to respond with such vigor.

The tone of the protests turned decidedly negative following that particular incident, which, along with the numerous state attempts to curtail peaceful expressions of free speech, prompted over 200 students to stage a sit-in outside the Executive Yuan to protest what they perceived to be excessive use of force by the police. After being hauled away by the police (videos can be found on TVBS and 華視), the students moved the protest to Liberty Plaza (自由廣場). The KMT has responded by pointing out that the sit-in was illegal, but it should also be noted that under current Taiwan law the police have the power to approve or reject applications for public demonstrations, as well as arrest those who subsequently engage in acts of protest.

Now that the violence has ended, another issue that has moved into the spotlight involves the rapid-fire detention of numerous current and former DPP officials, some of whom have been held incommunicado without being formally charged. The situation has prompted a number of scholars and experts, including former Far Eastern Economic Review bureau chief Julian Baum and former American Institute in Taiwan chairman Nat Bellocchi, to publish an open letter on the "erosion of justice in Taiwan". In addition, one of the detainees, Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen 蘇治芬, refused offers of bail and launched a hunger strike to protest her treatment, which has now resulted in her hospitalization. There now seems scant hope of achieving any form of transitional justice (轉型正義), especially with the return of hero worship of the Chiang's and the restoration of the name Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (國立中正紀念堂)

Some people claim that Taiwan is returning to the dark days of martial law and authoritarian rule. This is a gross and unfair exaggeration. Instead, what we are witnessing now seems more like the late 1980s, when democratization was just beginning but the KMT still held an overwhelming monopoly on power, with the executive branch displaying unbridled arrogance and the judicial branch running amok. One of the few ways for opposition elements to express their concerns was through street protests, some of which unfortunately turned violent and were soon followed by crackdowns launched under the banner of "law and order".

Whatever the future may hold, the current situation represents a great shame and loss of face for a country that has prided itself on its tolerance of free expression and respect for human rights. For its part, the opposition needs to follow the path of non-violence so clearly laid out by renowned leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. As for the government, it has an obligation to show greater restraint in the face of peaceful protests, as well as respect the views and needs of those with legitimate concerns about the state of the nation.

Ashes of Time Redux

One Director Reviews His Place in the Wuxia Genre’s Global Rise

By Matthew David Johnson

Six years before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo long cang hu, 2000), Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai was a pioneer in the genre of stylish, star-loaded, and festival-ready wuxia filmmaking. His Ashes of Time (Dung che sai duk / Dong xie xi du, 1994) reinterpreted martial arts fiction for a generation more accustomed to motion pictures and television serials than novels, at a time when Hong Kong’s economy was riding a crest of growth triggered by the opening of adjacent Guangdong to direct investment. Ashes represented a major investment for its producers, with a reputed budget of HK$40 million. Despite disappointing returns, the film’s technical merits won it top honors in Venice, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, while solidifying the reputations of Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle as emerging international talents.


Ashes of Time Redux is essentially the U.S. premiere of Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film. Yet much has changed in the fourteen years since Ashes’ original release. Wong himself has become an auteur par excellence; with this newest move, he has undeniably become principal curator of his own legacy. As Wong’s introductory blurb in the Sony Pictures Classics press kit accompanying Redux states:

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that there are several different version of ASHES IN TIME in circulation, some approved by me, some not, as well as the fact that the film was never released in much of the world including the United States. To rectify this situation, we decided to revisit this project and to create the definitive version (Ashes of Time Redux press kit, 3).

During an October 2008 press conference at the New York Film Festival, Wong, Doyle, and actress Brigitte Lin shared their memories of the film, while Wong himself retold more recent adventures spent tracking down salvageable copies of Ashes’ 35mm theatrical prints for Redux. The new version, which is shorter than the original, also features a brand-new score by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and multi-instrumentalist Wu Tong. Observant viewers will also note that despite hype over Ashes’ restoration, Redux features considerably re-edited, and in some cases re-shot, opening and final sequences. Given that the digital version includes saturated colors which would have been impossible in a 35mm format, one could also argue that Ashes’ already-considerable cinematographic achievements have received a substantial “upgrade” as well, giving the film a contemporary look which challenges the dominant browns and yellows of its first studio release (many of the scenes were shot in the desert).

Throughout the twentieth-century, international distribution and re-distribution has often subverted the notion of an “original” version. Re-edits, changed title cards and subtitles, shoddy transfers, and mutated aspect ratios are as much a part of cinematic history as changes in the motion picture medium. Wong Kar-wai’s decision to release a definitive version of Ashes of Time in the form of a “redux” is, in some ways, an admission that no such original has ever existed. Rather, the film now being rendered intelligible for U.S audiences familiar with the director of In the Mood for Love (Chun gwong cha sit / Chun guang zha xie, 1997) and 2046 (2004), and reintroduced to film markets worldwide.

Why now? One clue lies in the press kit’s relatively copious coverage of the jianghu universe “in which martial arts fiction is set … a universe that often intersects with our own … [and] mirror[s] the complications of real-life extended families in the Confucian tradition” (Ashes of Time Redux press kit, 10). This is the universe of the “wuxia epic,” or knight-errant genre now familiar to large segments of U.S. filmgoers following the success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu, 2004), and Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia, 2006). Whether Zhang’s films, which lack the wuxia novelistic pedigree of Wong’s and Lee’s features, can be considered proper additions to this genre is irrelevant. By blending jianghu tropes with fin de siècle imperial splendor, Hero and Curse in particular have established a basis for plausible consideration as legitimate heirs to the martial arts throne one occupied by Kung Hu, the Shaw Brothers, and Tsui Hark.

Press copy circulated by his U.S. publicists indicates that, in essence, Ashes of Time Redux should be seen as representing Wong Kar-wai’s own claim to pre-millennial wuxia pioneer status. Billing Wong as the first to bring these heroic figures and their jianghu “universe” to festival audiences, Redux is traced back to a “literary genre [which] dates back at least to the Ming Dynasty” (Ashes of Time Redux press kit, 11). Another historicist argument made by these materials positions the populist credentials of jianghu folk culture against “bans” on filmed wuxia epics imposed by successive Nationalist and Communist regimes—a narrative of anti-authoritarian rebellion which has followed mainland directors since the 1980s. Wuxia films have been popular with Sinophone audiences since the 1920s, when they were first released in large numbers. Yet while Bruce Lee’s first appearances in Chinatown theaters may have brought the actor to growing international awareness during the 1970s, trans-linguistic export of Hong Kong wuxia proper (distinguished by its connection to themes and characters invented by novelists Louis Cha, Gu Long, and others) has only become a big-money phenomenon in recent years. The original Ashes in Time is a case in point. While the film’s all-star Hong Kong cast and stylistic daring brought critical acclaim, it is often overlooked as an important film in Wong’s own early canon.


In short, “Wong Kar-wai the challenging auteur” is himself being reinvented as “Wong Kar-wai the prescient epic-maker.” The transition corresponds, perhaps, with Wong’s ongoing shift toward more linear filmmaking style incorporating Anglophone actors, as represented by My Blueberry Nights (2007) and upcoming historical drama The Lady from Shanghai (currently slated for a 2010 release). Both Redux and these other releases point to his arrival at a jumping-off point similar to that reached by Ang Lee circa Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Having mastered and reshaped expectations within the international festival and “art house” distribution circuits, Wong is now going global at the level of more popular genres—a level which now includes, as it did not in 1994, the wuxia epic (NOTE: two of the director’s rumored upcoming projects include Two Knives, which pits a U.S. secret service agent against two female martial artists, and The Grand Master, which concerns Bruce Lee’s former martial arts teacher Yip Man). While My Blueberry Nights performed unimpressively in U.S. box offices, the film’s success in France, Germany, and Japan presumably means that audiences for Wong’s past work—in the form of DVDs and other digital media—will also continue to grow.

In this changing commercial environment, notions of directorial identity are constantly in flux. The notion of a canon reflects a critical process of selection undertaken by film reporters, informed audience members, and directors concerned with the reception of their own work. Canons are invented, redacted, recontextualized, and reinvented constantly—much like films themselves, although neither writers nor audience members have been particularly attentive to this point. Record companies have already discovered the tensions over ownership and use which arise from intensified circulation of music in the digital era. Similarly, the “definitive” Ashes in Time Redux may not supplant the original, but nonetheless serves to remind filmgoers that Wong Kar-wai and Hong Kong cinema occupy an important place in the (invented, reinvented) history of transnational commercial cinema as well.

China Beatniks in Beijing

A group of China Beat contributors will be in Beijing this weekend for the Beijing Forum and other events. Jeff Wasserstrom, Ken Pomeranz, Susan Brownell, and Yong Chen will all be speaking at the Forum, which is an annual event that brings together scholars from around the world.

In addition, Jeff Wasserstrom will be making a presentation to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China on "Tales of Two Cities: Public Participation in Urban Politics in Beijing and Shanghai" at 10 a.m. on Monday, November 10. Admission for non-members is 50 RMB. More details are available here (look on the right-hand side for upcoming events).

Ken Pomeranz will be giving a talk at Tsinghua University on Monday, November 10 at 7:20 p.m. at the 图书馆报告厅 (details available here).

The Last General of the Red Army

Xiao Ke: Chinese revolutionary who fell foul of both Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping

By Ed Jocelyn

General Xiao Ke, who died last month in Beijing at aged 101, was the last surviving commander of the Chinese Red Army that made the legendary Long March. Only 27 when he led his troops out of their Communist base in south China, Xiao never reached the career heights promised by his youth and ability. Instead, his later life became notable for a commitment to principle that put him at odds with political reality.

Xiao Ke was born in Hunan Province to a scholarly family that had fallen on hard times. Three of his eight brothers and sisters died in infancy, yet by rural Chinese standards the Xiao family was still relatively well off. They possessed a small landholding that in the early 1920s was regularly raided by warlord soldiers and local militia – during this era, Chinese armed forces of all descriptions commonly supported themselves by looting. In his memoirs, Xiao recalled that his brother and cousin blamed at least some of this thievery on men who worked for a powerful local landlord, with whom they began a bitter dispute. In 1923, wrote Xiao, his brother and cousin were tricked into visiting this landlord’s estate, where they were seized and taken to the county government for summary execution.

The persecution of his family encouraged the young Xiao Ke to think about a military career. With soldiers at his command, he could punish the guilty and protect his own. He was further inspired by the example of another brother, who moved to Guangzhou in 1925 to enter military school. The following year, Xiao also moved to Guangzhou, where he studied for four months at the Central Military Committee Military Police Academy. After graduation, he entered the Guomindang’s National Revolutionary Army, taking part in the Northern Expedition that began in July 1926.

The Northern Expedition’s aim was to defeat the warlords of central, eastern and northern China and unite the country under Guomindang rule. Xiao Ke, however, fell under the influence of Communist officers in his regiment, which was led by the Communist Ye Ting. Xiao was already losing faith in Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-shek; this disillusionment was confirmed by Chiang’s massacre of Communists in Shanghai in April 1927. Xiao Ke joined the Party in June 1927.

One month later, his regiment was on its way to Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province. Ye Ting had committed his men to participating in the Communists’ first armed revolt on August 1. The uprising was a disaster. Although the Communists took control of the city easily, they lacked the means to hold onto it. After four days, the 20,000-strong rebel army marched south, aiming to establish a revolutionary base in Guangdong Province. But while the Communists had plenty of officers, they had few adherents among the rank and file. Within a fortnight, more than half the soldiers had deserted. On October 3, the remainder were scattered in battle. Xiao Ke was captured and imprisoned shortly afterwards.

Under interrogation, Xiao denied being a Communist and he was released after a few days. He returned home, where he was reunited with his brother and discovered that the elder Xiao had also joined the Party and been a soldier in the Northern Expedition. Not knowing where else to turn, the brothers decided to re-start the revolution themselves.

Having organized the few local Communists into a Party cell, they soon learned that a Communist army under Zhu De was inciting revolt around the southern Hunan town of Yizhang. This army was the sole fighting force to remain intact after the Nanchang Uprising. Around Spring Festival 1928, Xiao Ke and his comrades resolved to find and join Zhu De, the future commander-in-chief of the Red Army.

Instead, they met a group of Communist peasant rebels in Qishi, close to Yizhang, whose leader Peng Xi had been appointed by Zhu De. They formed an “Independent Armed Peasant Battalion,” with Peng Xi as commander and Xiao Ke as his deputy. From around one hundred men, this unit quickly swelled to more than six hundred, but it also came under severe pressure from enemy troops. Learning that another Communist force under Mao Zedong was nearby, Xiao Ke and his peasant army crossed the intervening mountain range and in April 1928 united with Mao’s “Red Army” at Longxidong.

Mao had temporarily left his base in Jinggangshan in Jiangxi in order to aid Zhu De, whose army was in trouble. Having repelled the enemy, Mao and Zhu De retreated together to Jinggangshan. Xiao Ke and his men went with them. In May, the combined Communist forces were grouped into the Fourth Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army, soon afterwards rechristened the Fourth Red Army. Xiao Ke became a company commander in the 29th Regiment.

In Jinggangshan, Xiao Ke revealed one of his lifelong talents: that of choosing the wrong side. Party propaganda tells of unity and the creation of the “Zhu-Mao Army,” the vanguard force of the Chinese revolution. In fact, Mao and Zhu De quickly fell out. Particular difficulty arose over Mao’s view of the Red Army. Mao was adamant that the army should serve the Communist Party - “the Party should control the gun,” as Mao put it. Zhu De disagreed, believing that in military matters, the views of military men should take precedence over those of politicians. The 21-year-old Xiao Ke took Zhu De’s side. But Mao’s view prevailed: first and foremost, the Red Army would be the Party’s army. More than sixty years later, Xiao Ke would once again take the losing side in a similar debate, this time with Deng Xiaoping over the army’s role in dealing with the Tian’anmen Square demonstrations.

There was little time to dwell on such disputes in 1928. The Communists were quickly forced out of Jinggangshan, from where they moved into the area around Ruijin, a small town in southern Jiangxi. Here, they established a base that survived repeated attack by Chiang Kai-shek in the early 1930s. Xiao rose swiftly through the ranks, becoming commander of the Red Sixth Army Group.



In July 1934, Xiao received orders to take his troops out of the Communist base area and move west. The Long March was about to begin. Under intense pressure from Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces, the entire Red Army and Communist Party leadership was to abandon the base in southern Jiangxi and transfer to a new, safer location. Xiao Ke’s task was to identify that location.

He failed. After being harried through Jiangxi, Guangxi and Hunan, the 6th Army was almost destroyed at Ganxi in northeast Guizhou Province. On October 7, 1934, they were trapped by a three-pronged attack that wiped out around two thirds of the 9,000-strong army. Xiao himself escaped thanks to a local hunter named Liu Guangrong, who guided Xiao and several other officers up the heavily forested mountain above Ganxi. The battle was hardly mentioned in post-Revolutionary histories of the Long March, but in later years Xiao hung a large painting of Ganxi in his home, a permanent reminder of the place where up to 6,000 of his men died.

Shortly after Ganxi, what was left of the Sixth Army met another small Communist army led by He Long, future Marshal of the People’s Republic of China. In its ranks was a 19-year-old woman named Jian Xianfo; she and Xiao Ke married in December 1934, a union broken only by Xiao’s death.

The two armies joined forces and established a base in northwest Hunan, before making their own 5,500-kilometer Long March to northwest China between November 1935 and October 1936, arriving twelve months after the main force under Mao Zedong. Already pregnant when the march began, Jian Xianfo gave birth to a boy in the Tibetan grasslands of northwest Sichuan Province. The child finished the Long March, but was later sent to live with his grandmother near Changde in Hunan. He is thought to have died in the Japanese germ attack on Changde in 1941.

Xiao Ke’s army was accompanied by an unwilling witness, a captive British missionary named Alfred Bosshardt. After his release in April 1935, Bosshardt wrote of the young commander:

“It was soon obvious to me that he was a cultured, educated man and born leader. I could not help but admire him, though we came from such different backgrounds.”

The night before releasing him, Xiao invited Bosshardt to dinner. When the conversation turned to religion, wrote Bosshardt, Xiao said, “I cannot understand how one educated abroad as you have been, can possibly believe in God. Surely you know we came from monkeys. I supposed that anyone with any brains at all knew that evolution is a fact.”

Xiao’s political acumen failed him once again during the Long March. In June, his and He Long’s forces united with the Red Fourth Front Army, led by Mao’s greatest rival, Zhang Guotao. Zhang had split from Mao the previous year and established a rival “Party Centre” with himself as leader. His Fourth Front Army was by far the largest of the Communist forces; if he could persuade He Long and Xiao Ke to support him, he seems to have believed he could march to Mao’s new base in the northwest and take full control of the Communist Party.

He Long was unequivocal. He is said to have publicly threatened to shoot Zhang if he did not toe the Party line. Xiao Ke, however, was swayed. The details of what passed between him and Zhang Guotao remain obscure. Xiao wrote nothing about it; in his own memoirs, written in exile, Zhang glossed over their meeting, knowing that candor could cost Xiao his life – Zhang’s political commissar, Chen Changhao, is said to have committed suicide in 1967 after being attacked as “Zhang Guotao’s running dog.” But it was accepted in the Party that Xiao had supported Zhang, who appointed him commander of the Fourth Front Army’s 31st Division. And Mao had a long, long memory for those who had slighted or opposed him – as Xiao had now done twice over.

After failing in his struggle with Mao, Zhang Guotao abandoned the Communist Party in 1938 and handed himself over to Chiang Kai-shek. As past relationships with Zhang proved a death sentence for many, Xiao Ke could be said to have fared well. After the Long March, his career merely stalled. He was sent to the front line in the Anti-Japanese War as deputy commander of the 120th Regiment, led by He Long. This was a typical Maoist manoeuvre: Mao knew Xiao and He Long had a poor relationship, despite (or more likely because of) their years of close cooperation. Xiao ended the civil war in 1949 as Chief of Staff to the Fourth Field Army led by Lin Biao, one year his junior and a still more precocious talent – as well as a supporter of Chairman Mao in Jinggangshan in 1928. After the establishment of Communist power in Beijing, Xiao was assigned to the Military Academy in Beijing, a backwater for those who did not want or were not allowed to pursue an active military or political role. When military ranks were established in the People’s Liberation Army in 1955, he was listed first among the 55 generals (previously, there had been no formal distinction between officers and enlisted men). Above him, however, were a number of senior generals and marshals who, many felt, lacked his background and abilities. This was taken as a deliberate slight by Chairman Mao, but it was a minor blow compared to what was around the corner.

In 1958, Xiao Ke and several colleagues came under political attack. Their crime was to be in favor of learning from the Soviet Army in order to “regularize and modernize” the People’s Liberation Army. In fact, such modernization had been official policy since the early 1950s, but Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai now declared that it represented mistaken “dogmatism’ because it lacked “political content.” At an expanded meeting of the Military Affairs Commission, Xiao was branded a “representative of the bourgeois military line.” Peng accused him of “military revisionism,” while Mao himself weighed in, declaring Xiao a “bad person, a member of the bourgeois team.” After the meeting, Xiao was subjected to “struggle sessions,” some of which went on all night. After one such session, he began coughing up blood; the doctor who treated him was criticized for “sympathizing with an anti-Party element.”

Xiao could not have been naïve about the Party’s capacity for vicious internal upheaval. He had participated in the bloody purge of the (fictitious) AB tuan in Jiangxi in the early 1930s, an episode he described thus:

“Our division had killed sixty [of its own] people… Then one night in our Divisional Party Committee, it was decided to kill sixty more. Next morning, I went to report… But at the Fourth Army Military Committee, [they] said, ‘You’re killing too many. If they are from worker and peasant backgrounds, you can just let them confess…’ After that, I went back at once. The prisoners had already been taken to the execution ground. I said, ‘Don’t kill them. The Divisional Party Committee must discuss this again.’ Afterwards, they decided to release more than thirty of them. But more than twenty were still killed. Altogether in the Fourth Army, 1,300 or 1,400 out of 7,000 men were struck down.”

But in 1958, Xiao was shocked and distressed to find himself the object of attack. Defiant at first, after four months of criticism and “struggle” he decided to give in and make a “confession” to satisfy his persecutors. He wrote later: “I had been in the Party more than thirty years…had taken part in the Northern Expedition, the Nanchang Uprising, the Southern Hunan Uprising, the Struggle in Jinggangshan, the Long March… The man can be struck down, but his history will stand.”

The official verdict on Xiao Ke’s “bourgeois military line and anti-Party activity” was handed down in May 1959. He retained his Party membership and was not imprisoned, but his career went into limbo. At the end of 1969, he was exiled to rural Jiangxi, where he took up carpentry and endured further interrogations. An accomplished poet since his early years, he recorded his feelings in verse:

“The yellow blooms long withered on the old battlefields
As the bitter west wind howls in deep winter
At Yunshan I write these verses of return
An old steed in his stable still longs to gallop.”

Just two months after the verdict on Xiao Ke, Peng Dehuai himself was struck down for “opposing Chairman Mao” and conducting “anti-Party activity.” Years later during the Cultural Revolution, Peng sent his nephew to apologize on his behalf to Xiao and the others persecuted in 1958. Xiao wrote in his memoirs that he had, in fact, long since stopped being angry with Peng because, “through the experience of the Cultural Revolution, I had acquired a greater understanding of internal Party struggle.” In other words, he didn’t blame Peng because he felt Peng’s actions were dictated by the political context of the time – a context set by just one man, Chairman Mao.

In 1972, Xiao’s fortunes began to improve. Back in Beijing, he was restored to a senior position in the Military Academy and appointed deputy Minister for Defense, a less elevated position than the title suggests as the Ministry’s most important responsibilities had been transferred to other departments after Peng Dehuai’s fall. After Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the verdict on Xiao’s “bourgeois military line and anti-Party activity” was overturned. He was appointed in 1980 as a vice chairman of the Fifth National Political Consultative Committee, and from 1982 sat on the Central Consultative Committee, a highly influential body composed exclusively of Party members with at least 50 years of service behind them.



The events of 1989 shook Xiao and many of his old comrades in the Central Consultative Committee. As the crisis over the Tiananmen Square demonstrations intensified, Deng Xiaoping decided to call the army into Beijing. Xiao Ke adamantly opposed this move. Together with former Minister of Defense Zhang Aiping, another veteran of the Long March, he composed a letter to Deng, which was signed by five other generals. They told Deng that if the army entered the city and opened fire, “the common people will curse us for 10,000 years.” Inspired by this example, more than one hundred other retired generals and Party leaders, mostly also members of the Central Consultative Committee, signed and sent a similar letter.

Gravely concerned at such opposition, Deng dispatched two of his most senior supporters, Yang Shangkun and Wang Zhen (political commissar to Xiao Ke’s Sixth Army Group during the Long March) to see Xiao Ke and the other six original signatories. They demanded retraction of the letter, arguing that such influential men could not be seen to oppose the Party leadership. None of them retracted, but their call went unheeded.

After the Tiananmen massacre, Deng dealt with his high-ranking opponents by trying to eliminate their political influence. As most of them were already retired, Deng contented himself with denying them official resources and forums to express their opinions. The Central Consultative Committee was abolished in 1992.

Cast out, Xiao Ke devoted his last active years to scholarship and literature. He and Zhang Aiping were among the founders of the Yanhuang Cultural Study Association, which in 1991 launched the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, which continues to rank among the most progressive publications on the Chinese mainland. Editor Du Daozheng recalled how there was trouble over the very first issue, which contained an essay by Li Rui, Chairman Mao’s former secretary and a man considered representative of the “dissidents” of 1989. Du went to see Xiao Ke, who told him, “Just publish it! If someone has an issue afterwards, you just reply: ‘This essay was reviewed and approved by Xiao Ke. If you have a problem, please call Xiao Ke. I can give you Xiao Ke’s telephone number right now.’”

Xiao became particularly concerned about history and its truthful telling. During the 1980s, he remembered the British missionary Alfred Bosshardt and asked Chinese embassy officials to see if they could find out what happened to him. It turned out that Bosshardt was still alive and well, and the two men shared a brief correspondence. When Bosshardt’s account of his Long March captivity, The Guiding Hand, was translated and published in China in 1989, Xiao Ke wrote in a foreword: “Historical facts are the best authority… We did make some mistakes after the establishment of the Communist Party. We do not want to talk about them, but it is not right to prevent others from doing so. Those who criticize may have their own standpoints and we must see whether this is the truth. In his book Mr Bosshardt could not praise us… It will not harm those already dead to reveal past mistakes, and could be educational in the present.”

He returned to this theme in his foreword to a monumental, two-volume history of the Long March, whose preparation and publication he oversaw in 1996. Flying in the face of Party orthodoxy, he insisted that where there were different accounts of any given event, all should be included. That same year, during a meeting commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Long March he lost patience with the endless speeches in praise of Mao. He rose and spoke impromptu: “The real Long March [was achieved through] the efforts of every single Red Army soldier. We should not, as we did in the past, make a cult of personality.”

Sixty years earlier, Alfred Bosshardt wrote of his thoughts on first meeting Xiao Ke: “Why, I wondered, did this man, who could have enjoyed a life of ease and pleasure, throw in his lot with those who were striving to bring justice to the poor, oppressed peasants?” Xiao wrote little about specific motivations, but he expressed his feelings eloquently. In his foreword to Bosshardt’s book, he considered how people with very different backgrounds and beliefs could still become friends, but his words could just as well apply to his revolutionary ideal. He wrote: “Mencius said, ‘Everyone is compassionate.’ Indeed, this must be the common concern of all mankind.”



Xiao Ke spent the final years of his life in No.301 Hospital in Beijing, which he entered in April 1999. He is survived by his wife, Jian Xianfo, and son, Xiao Xinghua.

Xiao Ke, revolutionary, born July 14 1907, died October 24 2008.

Ed Jocelyn holds a Ph.D in history from the University of Bradford in the UK. In 2002 Jocelyn launched the New Long March project with Andrew McEwen. Together, they set out to retrace the Long March of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, on foot. In the following five years, Jocelyn trekked 8,000 miles through remote parts of China. The story is told in The Long March, published in five languages in 2006-7. Jocelyn's current research explores the history of the revolutionary era in Kham, focusing particularly on the Tibetan rebellion in Zhongdian, and he also runs the Red Rock Trek and Expedition Company with fellow adventurer Yang Xiao.

Obama Elected, China Reacts

Chinese reactions to Obama's election range broadly, as exemplified in this morning's news coverage. Dominant themes include racial equality, financial security, a changing international profile for the U.S., and trade implications. [Please let us know if you find outstanding coverage elsewhere that you feel should be flagged--either by submitting a comment or by sending an email to thechinabeat@gmail.com.]

From Jim Yardley's piece (it is the last piece before the comments section begins) on Chinese reaction to Obama's election, at The New York Times:

...Mr. Tang, 23, admitted that the American election had been a serious distraction during his Wednesday morning classes. Given the different time zones, the outcome was still uncertain. Yet now that he could assess the historic Obama victory, Mr. Tang’s reaction seemed akin to a sports fan dissecting a box score and betrayed none of the hopeful idealism once conferred on Western-styled democracy by young Chinese intellectuals.

“We are different from the younger generation 20 years ago,” Mr. Tang said, alluding to the generation defined, and scarred, by the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. “Now we can take a more rational, sober approach when we observe the election. The generation 20 years ago grew up in a different environment. America was like a completely different world. It would be shocking to watch this.”

Mr. Tang’s cool detachment is just a small reminder that if the idealism of young voters in the United States was considered critical to Mr. Obama’s victory, their peers in authoritarian China are often less convinced of the transformative potential of democracy. The bookcases outside Mr. Tang’s classrooms are filled with journals assessing the Sino-American relationship and several students said Mr. Obama’s candidacy had become a subject of much interest and discussion...

And from Evan Osnos at The New Yorker, "Breakfast in Beijing":

...“Obama gives greater confidence to people of the Third World,” Yang said after the photo. “We, the black, yellow and other races, can be the same as the whites! We struggled for independence and, finally, won that. Now we have won in another field—political affairs—and in a superpower no less.”

In China, Obama’s success has attracted particular curiosity because his emergence is such a thoroughly un-Chinese phenomenon. Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of CommunistParty road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao’s cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible...

From the BBC's interviews with Chinese people:

"American elections have shaken me to the core. I have always thought the Chinese political system is the best in the world, but it is not so. We are deprived of our sacred rights, rule of law and human rights are trampled upon. To have a democratic system like the one in the USA is more difficult than touching the sky... But we long to achieve freedom and democracy, which is a difficult task for us young people in China." (Anonymous)

From Nathan Gardels at Huffington Post, a collection of international views on Obama, including a piece on "If America Accepts Obama, Then It Can Accept the Rise of China" by Wang Jisi (dean of Beida's School of International Studies):

...Among Chinese intellectuals and elites ,who are supposedly more knowledgeable about international affairs, including some senior specialists on America, stereotypes persisted.

Some of them have believed that "America could not accept a black president." Many in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have predicted that something dramatic, similar to John F. Kennedy's assassination or Chen Shui-bian's mysterious "bullet event," would happen to disrupt the process. To them, America, after all, is a nation full of conspiracies, from the alleged "discovery" of Saddam Hussein's nuclear devices to the machinations that precipitated the current financial storm.

These suspicions reflect a common image of the United States in China: a white-dominated, highly competitive society that believes only in power politics and the "rule of the jungle." Just as America would not elect a candidate from an ethnic minority, this thinking goes, neither would it ever accept the rise of a non-Western nation -- China. Instead, America would do its utmost to contain and weaken China unless it changes into a country like Japan.

Now that the election campaign is behind us, it's time for both Chinese and Americans to view each other anew. Chinese should see the United States as a nation not necessarily discriminating against people or nations that are racially, culturally or politically different...

And for those of you interested in China-related election minutiae, Don King issued his endorsement of Obama yesterday from Chengdu.

For other coverage:
"Obama's Race, Youth Welcomed in Worried China" (Reuters)

"We Wish US-President Elect Obama Well" (China Daily)

"How Will Obama Prove for China?" (Times of India)

"China Reacts Cautiously to Barack Obama's Win" (Telegraph, with audio from Richard Spencer)

"Barack Obama: The View from China" (Guardian)

"China, Emerging Asia to Fight 'Protectionist' Obama" (Bloomberg)

"American Election and Chinese Rice Bowl" (Inside-Out China)

"Obama Victory Provokes Trade Worries in Asia" (Forbes)

"Obama to Retain Taiwan Policy" (Taipei Times)

"Obama's Election Will Change Taiwan-U.S. Relations: DPP Lawmakers" (Taiwan News)

"Now it's 'Cool America'" (Asia Times)

"No Strong Reaction from China's Leaders" (Washington Wire, Wall Street Journal) (See also: "The Election in the Chinese Media" by Sky Canaves)

Literature Prizes: Chinese Writers Make the List

The short list for the Man Asian Literary Prize was announced last week. The Man Prize is awarded to a work that isn’t available in English (the award partly covers translation of the work), but an excerpt translated into English is read by the judges. The award, which debuted last year when it was awarded to Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, has named another Chinese writer to its short list this year: Yu Hua.

For those interested in learning more about Yu Hua and his writing, an excerpt from his nominated work, Brothers, has been posted at the Man Prize website. The work was reviewed earlier this year by the New York Times.

FOB (friend of the blog) Pankaj Mishra is one of the judges for the prize, so we’ll be watching the results closely.

Yu’s place on the short list comes just after the announcement last month that Mo Yan (Red Sorghum, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Life and Death are Wearing Me Out) won the inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Regular China Beat contributor Haiyan Lee was one of the judges for that prize.

The rising profile of Chinese writers and Chinese literature is promising, particularly for readers who rely on English translations (or want to share their faves with friends, students, etc. who do).

"Our Woman in China": Louisa Lim

By Angilee Shah

Louisa Lim's life as National Public Radio's Shanghai correspondent is characterized by extreme variety. Much like China itself, Lim takes on many roles: hard-hitting investigative reporter, insightful trend spotter, art connoisseur, mother and even restaurateur. It turns out, she's an excellent email-writer as well.

In a wide-ranging Web 2.0 interview, in between covering the Beijing Olympics and the ever-growing melamine disaster, she described her experiences in her three years as the Beijing correspondent for the BBC and then two with National Public Radio. She talked about the challenges of breaking news but still providing depth of coverage, the West's growing interest in China and the joys of deep fried bumble bees.

Angilee Shah: There is a phrase in the West that has taken on mythical qualities: "Our man in China." But you and many others prove that these days it's likely to actually be "our woman in China" instead. What have been your most memorable (good and bad) experiences as a woman reporting in China? In the last five years, while you've been based in China, have you seen any changes with regards to women in the press?

Louisa Lim: The most memorable experiences as a woman reporting in China would probably have to be a trip I made to Xinjiang in 2003 to cover the AIDS problem there with my then producer at the BBC, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore. At the time she was around 23 and looked even younger. We'd arranged part of the trip officially because we wanted to interview local government officials from the department of health. When we arrived at their office, their faces fell. We sat around, drinking tea and waiting. In the next room, we could hear the government officials conferring with each other worriedly, "What's the BBC doing?", they were asking. "Do you think these are real reporters? They look more like kids on work experience."

Certainly it's a common expectation that a foreign correspondent will be a white middle-aged male, and subverting that expectation can be both entertaining and a useful reportorial tool. In this particular case, it worked to our advantage. The official we interviewed was outrageously condescending and treated us like idiots right until he realised belatedly that he'd admitted all sorts of shortcomings in AIDS provision on tape.

On that trip, I definitely felt the drawbacks of being a female journalist in China. I'd wanted to interview sex workers, and we ended up at an isolated line of truck stop hovels on the outskirts of Urumqi one snowy night at two in the morning, watching men in thick army coats guarding the brothel doors with ferocious guide dogs. It was the first time, and one of the very few times, I'd ever wished that I'd brought a male colleague along as well, just for safety's sake.

Obviously in some cases, it's much easier working as a woman in China, particularly when interviewing women in the countryside, who might be embarrassed or shy about talking to men. For example I did a story talking to some of the last women with bound feet, and I was surprised (and slightly horrified) at the alacrity with which one woman whisked off her shoes and socks to show me her tiny, misshapen paws. I'm not sure whether she would have done that if I'd been male.

In general, I think the situation has improved somewhat since our Urumqi trip in 2003. I've worked through two pregnancies in China, climbing up glaciers and going down coal mines while pregnant, and have found that my gender is becoming less of an issue as time goes by.

AS: China coverage in the West in the last few months has been dominated by the Olympics, Tibet and human rights records, and, of course, financial growth. Stories about health issues like AIDS aren't all that common in the mass media. Are there any areas of coverage that you think should be better addressed? Do you think the Olympics will help media take more interest in these kinds of stories, or just cause China burnout?

LL: I think the Olympics has caused China fatigue when it comes to certain types of stories, which have been covered so many times that they've become the clichés of China coverage (for example, China's rise or the new face of Beijing or the disappearing hutongs). But I think opinion surveys are showing that the Olympics has caused interest in China overseas to spike. And that will mean more interest in China coverage that gets beyond the clichés. Of course, health issues are now extremely topical, given the contaminated milk scandal, and that's likely to continue. From a practical perspective, given the amount of huge stories involving China this year -- the unrest in Tibet, the torch relay, the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics -- it's been difficult to devote much time to do any real in-depth investigative reporting on other issues. But I expect there will be more investigative reporting from the Western media now.

AS: During the Olympics, you did a story about empty seats in Beijing. I was watching many of the events and the closing ceremony on CCTV -- it's funny how you never see those empty seats (and how often
you see Hu Jintao). The Columbia Journalism Review ran a really interesting piece about NBC's use of the CCTV feed. How much control do you think China exerted over how international viewers saw the Olympics?

LL: I can't really answer this question in any meaningful fashion as, being in China, I saw the Chinese Olympics, not that seen overseas. I did hear from others that NBC's use of footage veered on the farcical -- my editor told me he watched the gymnastics and it appeared only to have two competitors (Liukin and Johnson), both American!

AS: How large is National Public Radio's presence in China? How many bureaus and reporters are there? From health to economy to politics, the country has considerable breadth. How do you decide what to focus on? Is your reporting more often than not driven by what the big news of the day is?

LL: National Public Radio has two permanent correspondents in China: Anthony Kuhn in Beijing and myself in Shanghai. This year has also seen China trips by a number of specialist reporters, for example our Education Correspondent and our Arts Correspondent. Our flagship programme, "All Things Considered," also hosted a special China week, during which two anchors were based in Chengdu. By chance, this coincided with the earthquake in Sichuan, meaning that NPR already had a very strong team of journalists on the ground in Chengdu at the time of the earthquake, and was able to provide the first eyewitness accounts in the Western media.

Obviously this year our reporting has been driven by breaking news, but we do also try to try to get behind the headlines. For example, before the Olympics I did a five-part series on the role of sport in China and how it's being used to rally the masses. Another example of more in-depth coverage was a series that I did on urban development in China, focusing on Shanghai.

We have a commitment to cover China beyond the major cities, and so we travel a tremendous amount to try to reflect the changes that are taking place in the countryside and in smaller cities. I'm providing links to a few of those stories: a slideshow I did with photographer Ariana Lindquist about China's dependence on coal, a story on the resulting environmental damage from the most polluted city in China and a piece from the edge of the Tibetan plateau on China's melting glacier.

NPR's interest in cultural and artistic news is also great for reporters in the field, as radio can really bring alive these stories in a way that other media can't. I've recently worked on a couple of pieces, which have yet to air, about how two young musicians are experimenting with traditional art forms. It focuses on an ex-punk who became a Mongolian throatsinger and a Kunqu singer who's been collaborating with a Belgian jazz pianist. This [linked here] is a story about how Miao people still use a singing festival for courtship in southwestern Yunnan.

AS: How's the British food business treating you? [Ed note: the link is to a piece Lim wrote in 2004 about the Beijing fish-and-chips restaurant she, her husband, and several other partners founded.]

LL: The fish and chip shops are doing very well, though I'm not sure that we've managed to convert that many Chinese customers to the joys of greasy, thick-cut chips! We now have two branches of Fish Nation in Beijing, one in Sanlitun and the other in Nanluoguxiang, near Houhai. Our customers are still mainly expats -- often those who've had a drink or two -- and we are hoping to become a Beijing institution!

In Shanghai however, we've done something different and opened a Yunnan restaurant called Southern Barbarian. It specialises in cuisine from my husband's hometown, Mengzi, the home of cross-the-bridge-noodles (guoqiaomixian). We're becoming pretty well-known for our goats' cheese, charcoal-grilled meat and rice noodles, or mixian. This is where we aim to convert Western diners to the joys of Yunnan cuisine, including lesser-known delights like sautéed pomegranate flowers, spicy banana-flower salad and deep fried bumble bees!