A Reader: Protests and Public Relations

This morning the Los Angeles Times reported on a riot in Gansu that was touched off over disagreements on city planning issues. The report comes on the heels of an uptick in news in the last week on local protests in China. It is unclear if this increased coverage represents an actual increase in local protests (based on reports from the Chinese government in recent years, there are hundreds of local protests each week in China) or if the economic crisis has simply increased the relevance of these protests.

But much of the coverage we've been reading has been less concerned with how representative these protests are; rather China watchers are focusing on what the government's response to both protestors and media coverage tells us about a new CCP public relations attitude. Below, a selection of recent reports.

1. The event that has drawn the most attention in recent weeks has been the taxi driver strikes in several major cities. Xujun Eberlein reported on the strike in her hometown of Chongqing at New America Media:

“In the early morning hours of Monday, November 3rd, however, passengers in Chongqing waiting to go to work by cab were the first to discover them missing from the streets. At the same time, some drivers unaware of the strike, were stopped by their colleagues. Tempers flared, and some 20 to 30 cabs had their top lights smashed, according to reports.

“Within hours, several national outlets of the official media, such as China Daily (China Daily), Xinhuanet.com, and People.com.cn, published the first eyewitness reports, which included interviews with taxi drivers and customers alike. The frankness of those reports surprised me.

“While it was good to see a refreshing departure from the familiar bureaucratic style of official news, the real journalism approach was certainly not as widespread as I would have liked. On the same day, another official agency, China News, published a curt and rigid briefing of the situation, in the usual manner that conceals as much bad news as possible. It opens with a description of the all-city strike as 'a partial number of taxis that met with obstruction and were unable to operate normally.' It ends with the conclusion that 'by 4 pm of [November] 3rd, 1,000 taxies had resumed operation,' with no mention that the total number of taxies on strike was about 9,000. The strike, in fact, went on for another day, through Tuesday. It was not until Wednesday morning that the government announced the full resumption of normal operation of all taxies.”

2. As Eberlein notes in her report, one of the remarkable bits about the strike was its peaceful end—including mediation and negotiation from the local government. The Economist, too, emphasized the government’s apparent soft touch in this case:

“To assuage them, Chongqing’s Communist Party chief, Bo Xilai, a Politburo member, held a meeting with strikers. Even more unusually, he allowed live coverage of the event, though by then most drivers had returned to work. In Sanya the acting mayor apologised to the drivers, but the strike dragged on into November 13th. The drivers in Gansu agreed to end their strike after the authorities promised to crack down on unlicensed taxis.”

3. As Bloomberg reports (quoting China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom), this tack represents a new direction in public relations for the Chinese government (in large part, the piece asserts, as a result of citizens’ ability to trade information online):

“Disgruntled taxi drivers in Chongqing air their complaints following a two-day strike while a top official of the southwestern Chinese city nods intently.

“’You spoke really well, thank you,’ says Bo Xilai, the Commmunist Party chief, complimenting a participant who talked with a thick regional accent. ‘I was able to understand 90 percent of what you said.’

“The three-hour meeting, available online across China through major Web portals, is more reminiscent of local government access in the U.S. than in a country where protests have typically met with swift repression.

“As Chinese citizens increasingly use the Internet to get news, share videos, vent frustrations and expose abuses of power, leaders are being forced to react publicly to their concerns. Government officials are also adapting traditional media-control techniques to the information age -- including sending out press releases and approved articles on topics that once would have been completely suppressed.

“’They've learned that they come off looking better if they're somewhat more transparent, somewhat quicker to respond,’ says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who has studied protest in China. ‘They're learning spin control.’”

4. In addition to more open dealings with disgruntled citizens, however, China Media Project writes that the media coverage of the taxi strikes also points to the Chinese government’s increasing willingness to allow open reporting shifting management of media:

“The important thing to recognize first of all is that the issues underlying these taxi strikes are not newly emerging, nor are they news to party officials. But the handling of these incidents reveals some interesting trends (and inconsistencies) in China’s press control policy…One of the key characteristics of Control 2.0 is the active setting of the agenda through rapid but selective news coverage by critical state media such as Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television and People’s Daily. This is what Hu Jintao meant when he said in June that the media needs to “actively set the agenda” (主动设置议题).”

5. For a more alarmist take on this topic, see The New Republic's piece today, subtitled, "How the global economic crisis could bring down the Chinese government." Author Joshua Kurlantzick here makes the claim that "as the economy turns sour, protest is rising," though, again, it isn't clear to us if there has actually been an increase or if Western media has simply been reporting more regularly on Chinese protests because their narrative now fits with the international story of the global economic downturn (rather than protests over localized issues in China):

"Normally, the Pearl River Delta, a manufacturing hub in southern China, whirs with the sound of commerce. Alongside massive new highways, clusters of factories churn out toys, electronics, and other consumer products for the world; in Pearl River cities like Guangzhou, nouveau riche businesspeople cut deals at swank hotels.

"But in recent months, the Delta has started to seem more like Allentown, circa 1980s. As the global financial crisis hits Western consumers' wallets, orders for the Delta's products have dried up. And angry factory workers, many owed back pay, have taken to the streets. In one recent incident, some 300 suppliers and creditors "descended on the River Dragon complex [a factory where the owners vanished] looting warehouses in the hopes of salvaging something," As USA Today reported.

"This unrest is likely to spiral. As the Chinese economy sours for the first time in years, the government this week announced a $586 billion stimulus package. But in some ways, much more is at stake: While, in the U.S., a financial failure would simply mean another dent in George W. Bush's reputation, in China it could mean the breakdown of the entire political order."

G. William Skinner

By Daniel Little

G. William Skinner was one of the most innovative social scientists to have turned his attention to China in the past thirty years. Bill passed away on October 25, 2008, but his influence on how we think about China will survive him for a long, long time. (See this list of Skinner's publications to get an impression of the depth and scope of his contributions.) Bill was a generous and open scholar, and many scholars working in the field today owe him a permanent debt of gratitude for his advice and support in the past several decades. (See this Chinese obituary documenting Skinner's significance for Chinese scholars.)

Bill was a particularly fertile thinker when it came to using analytical and spatial models to explicate social reality in China (and occasionally Japan or France). (His work on Japanese demographic behavior is a great example; he devised an analytical framework for permitting inferences about family planning choices within Japanese peasant families demonstrating very specific preferences about birth order depending on the age and wealth of the parents. See "Conjugal Power in Tokugawa Japanese Families" in Sex and Gender Hierarchies, edited by B. D. Miller (Cambridge University Press, 1989).) Skinner was insistent that social data need to be analyzed in spatial terms; he believed that many social patterns will be best understood when they are placed in their geographical context. And the reason for this is straightforward: human social activity itself is structured in space, through transport systems, habitation patterns, the circuits of merchants and necromancers, and the waterways that integrate social and economic systems in pre-modern societies. He also believed that identifying the right level of geographical aggregation is an important and substantive task; for example, he argued against the idea of making economic comparisons across provinces in China, on the basis that provincial boundaries emerged as a result of a series of administrative accidents rather than defining "natural" boundaries of human activity.

Several ideas that Skinner developed in detail have had particular impact. His analysis of the marketing systems of Sichuan using the conceptual tools of central place theory was very influential when it appeared in three parts in the Journal of Asian Studies (1964-65) (part I, part II, part III). This analysis was illustrative in several key ways. It gave an important empirical instance for the abstract geometry of cental place theory -- the nested hexagons that represent the optimal spatial distribution of towns, villages, and cities. But more important, the analysis creates an important shift of focus from the village to the larger social systems of interchange within which villages are located -- the patterns of social intercourse that are associated with periodic markets, the flow of ideas associated with the circuits of martial arts specialists, and the likelihood of intersections between economic, cultural, and political processes rooted in the geometry of social exchange.






SOURCE: Skinner, G. William. 1964-65. Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China. Journal of Asian Studies 24 (1-3), pp. 22-23

A second highly influential idea also falls within the intellectual precincts of economic geography. Skinner offered an analysis of the economic geography of late imperial China in terms of a set of eight (or nine) macroregions: physiographically bounded regions consisting of core and periphery, regarding which the bulk of trade occurs internally rather than externally. Skinner argues in this body of research that it is analytically faulty to treat China as a single national market system in this period of time; rather, economic activity was largely confined within the separate macroregions. He used empirical measures to establish the distinctions between core and periphery, as well as to draw boundaries between adjacent macroregions. As he points out, the economic geography of traditional Chinese economy was largely governed by transport cost, and this meant that China's river systems largely defined the shape and scope of intra- and inter-regional markets. And he demonstrated how human activity was structured by the patterns of social interaction defined by these macroregions -- for example, the transfer of soil fertility from periphery to core through the gathering of fuel wood in the periphery, which then is transferred to core soils after burning.


SOURCE: Skinner, G. William. 1977. Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China. In The City in Late Imperial China, edited by G. W. Skinner. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 215.

Another critical contribution that Skinner provided, through his own contribution to the highly important City in Late Imperial China volume (link), is the idea of a hierarchy of urban systems. Skinner argued that there was an orderly hierarchy of places, ranging from higher-level cities through lower-level cities, market towns, and villages. He distinguishes between two types of hierarchy: administrative-bureaucratic hierarchy of places and the economic-commercial hierarchy of places. These two systems create different characteristics and functions for the cities that fall within them. This body of formal analytical ideas is borrowed from urban geographers such as Walter Crystaller and Johann Heinrich von Thünen. Skinner's genius was to recognize that these analytical approaches provided a lens through which to make sense of Chinese social activity across space and time that other approaches do not. In particular, Bill demonstrated the utility of a spatial and regional approach in contrast to both purely statistical analyses of China's economy and village-level ethnographic studies that ignored the urban and town relationships within which village society was situated.


SOURCE: Skinner, G. William, ed. 1977. The City in Late Imperial China, Studies in Chinese society. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, p. 289


SOURCE: Skinner, G. William, ed. 1977. The City in Late Imperial China, Studies in Chinese society. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, p. 294

A central and crucial aspect of Skinner's thinking is spatial; he was vastly ahead of the GIS revolution in the social sciences, in that he consistently tried to analyze China's social, economic, and cultural data in terms of the spatial patterns that it displayed decades before the corresponding desktop computation capability was available. I visited his research laboratory at UC-Davis sometime early in the 1990s, and was struck by a couple of vignettes. When I arrived he was poring over a Chinese census atlas in eight gradations with a magnifying glass; he was laboriously coding counties by the color representing a range of social estimates. And when he brought me to examine a wall-sized map he had produced mapping sex ratios across part of southeastern China, he was interested in pointing out how the values of sex ratios corresponded to the core-periphery framework mentioned above. I pointed out a small, bounded region in southwest China that appeared to be anomalous, in that it represented an island of normal sex ratios in a sea of high male-female ratios. He instantly replied: that's an ethnic minority population that doesn't discriminate against girls. Culture and space!

Another of Skinner's crucial contributions to the China field -- and to historical social science more generally -- was his devotion to the project of creating a public database of historical Chinese social, economic, and cultural data at the county level. This effort contributed to the eventual formation of the China Historical Geographical Information System (CHGIS). What is striking about this work is that it was begun at a period in which the desktop computing tools that would permit easy and flexible use of the data -- in producing historical statistical maps, for example -- did not yet exist.

G. William Skinner provided a genuinely unique contribution to our understanding of the social realities of China. His contributions were innovative in the deepest sense possible: he brought an appropriate set of tools to each topic of investigation he addressed, without presuming that existing analytical techniques would do the job.

Murder Most Foul

Both the Guangxu Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi died one hundred years ago this week (November 14 and November 15, respectively), and some of our favorite news sites and blogs have been commemorating the anniversaries, made more newsworthy by the recent revelations that Guangxu was (as has long been suspected) poisoned. Here's a short reading guide for whodunnit (the debate continues) and further reflections:

1. NPR’s Louisa Lim on the latest theories of Guangxu's death:

“Guangxu died just 22 hours before the 74-year-old Empress Dowager Cixi. Imperial medical records indicated that Guangxu's death was due to natural causes. But even then, there were rumors of murder most foul. Now modern science has uncovered the truth.

“‘We took a hair measuring 10 inches, and after analysis, we found its arsenic content was 2,400 times higher than normal,' says Zhu Chenru, deputy director of the National Committee for the Compilation of Qing history. The research was carried out over the past five years by his institute, the China Institute of Atomic Energy, the forensic lab of the Beijing police and China Central Television.”

2. Danwei made an earlier post on the same topic:

“Even in his own day, the cause of death was disputed. The emperor's doctor's diary recorded that Guangxu had 'spells of violent stomach ache', with his face turning blue. Such symptoms are consistent with arsenic poisoning. Actually, three persons were suspected behind the murder. The empress, her eunuch Li Lianying, and general Yuan Shikai, who betrayed Guangxu in the last days of the reforms and directly caused their failure.

“A new study aiming to find the truth behind the murder allegations has delivered its conclusions, right before the 100th anniversary of Guangxu's death. A series of tests has established that the cause of Guangxu's death was indeed arsenic poisoning, confirming a 100 year old rumor.”

3. Jeremiah Jenne at Jottings from the Granite Studio riffs on the same theme:

“There has always been speculation about what really happened to Guangxu (and Tongzhi, for that matter). The timing was just a little too neat, a little too convenient for too many people at court. Cixi certainly feared what Guangxu might do if he ever had a chance to rule on his own. Yuan Shikai no doubt worried (probably with good reason) about retaliation for his duplicity 10 years earlier. Cixi’s long reign depended on a series of allies, henchmen, and toadies, all of whom were looking at unemployment (or worse) if Guangxu grabbed the reins of power. The general consensus was that it was probably best to off the guy and–fate of the dynasty be damned–put another kid on the throne, which is exactly what happened.”

4. As Geremie Barme notes in a piece that draws on his new book on the history of the Forbidden City, the court intrigue at the center of this story has more generally influenced Western perceptions of China and the Chinese people:

“...In many films, novels and plays, as well as in journalistic accounts, both Western and Chinese, there has been a tendency to conflate court secrecy, traditional politics and the intricate design of the palaces with the nature of the Chinese people and society as a whole.

“As Simone de Beauvoir remarked, the ‘city into which the population is not admitted has obviously usurped the title city.’

“The palace and its intrigues, its mystique and its history have thus played a central role in defining both Chinese and Western perceptions of China.”

5. The Guangxu Emperor is best known for his role in the abortive 1898 reform efforts. For a scholarly take on the importance of 1898 reforms, see the 2002 edited volume, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China . (For a preview of the volume on Google see here.)

China Beatniks in Beijing: II

Yong Chen, UCI history professor and China Beat contributor, was one of several of our regular contributors to attend the Beijing Forum, an international meeting of scholars to discuss vital issues facing the world. This year's theme for the conference was "The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All" ("文明的和谐与共同繁荣") and aimed at promoting the development of the social sciences and humanities in the Asia-Pacific region.

While in Beijing, Yong Chen gave a talk on "Chinese-Americans and the American Government." A report about this talk has been posted (in Chinese) by Yong's former Beijing University classmate, Yang Yusheng, at the website Academic Criticism (学术批评网). You can check out the full report here.

As mentioned in our previous post on "China Beatniks in Beijing," Ken Pomeranz and Jeff Wasserstrom also gave public talks while in Beijing. For a write-up of Wasserstrom's talk "Tale of Two Cities" (written by another regular China Beat contributor), see Jeremiah Jenne's post at Jottings:

"Professor Wasserstrom, who has also published a volume on student protests in 20th century China, argues that the government is less concerned about the numbers of local protests than they are about the spector of key issues linking the interests of different social classes or geographic areas."

EDIT: For another take on Wasserstrom's talk, see this piece from the Hindustan Times, by a reporter who attended the lecture.

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).