China Beat Turns 1!

China Beat has been in operation now for a full year. And what a year! We started this blog with the inkling that 2008 might be eventful, if only because of the Olympic Games. But the past year turned out to be one of China’s most eventful and traumatic in modern history.

It’s been an honor for us to be able to add our thoughts and ideas into the mix. We’re enormously grateful to our many contributors, as well as you, our readers, for stopping by regularly and letting us know your thoughts and sharing your own knowledge.

Here are some fun facts and lists from a year of China Beat…

In the past year, China Beat has had:
300 Posts (This makes 301!)
148,784 Visits
84,612 Unique Visitors
221,294 Pageviews
Most visits in one day: July 15, 2008 (1,509 visitors)
Fewest visits in one day: February 9, 2008 (61 visitors)
Total countries of origin for China Beat visitors: 168 (see below for the top ten)

Our most viewed stories in 2008:

1. Kung Fu Panda, Go Home!, by Haiyan Lee, July 17, 2008 (3,651 views)

2. Obama Elected, China Reacts, by China Beat, November 5, 2008 (2,542 views)

3. China: Democracy, or Confucianism?, by Xujun Eberlein, June 6, 2008 (2,493 views)

4. Writing Factory Girls, by Leslie T. Chang, May 24, 2008 (2,459 views)

5. Five Chinese Historical Events That Don’t Get Much Attention, by Kate Merkel-Hess, February 11, 2008 (2,350 views)

6. The Taelspin on Tibet: The Chinese response to foreign media coverage of the 3.14 unrest, by Jeremiah Jenne, March 27, 2008 (2,075 views)

7. WoW in China and the US, by Miri Kim, October 28, 2008 (2,020 views)

8. Beijing Olympic FAQ #1: Politics and the Olympics, by Susan Brownell, January 25, 2008 (1,883 views)

9. Rumor and the Sichuan Earthquake, by Steve Smith, May 22, 2008 (1,779 views)

10. Five Sites for Lesson Plans and Teaching Materials on China, by China Beat, April 25, 2008 (1,775 views)

Almost 44 percent of our traffic in the last year came from referring sites. Many thanks to these sites, who sent readers our way:
1. EastSouthWestNorth (12,998 visitors)
2. Danwei (3,696 visitors)
3. Salon (specifically Andrew Leonard at How the World Works) (3,079 visitors)
4. Jottings from the Granite Studio (2,829 visitors)
5. China Digital Times (2,287 visitors)
6. Peking Duck (1,874 visitors)
7. China Journal at the Wall Street Journal (1,642 visitors)
8. Frog in a Well (1,619 visitors)
9. China Law Blog (1,477 visitors)
10. James Fallows at the Atlantic Monthly (691 visitors)

The top keyword searches that brought visitors to China Beat:
1. china beat
2. the china beat
3. charter 08
4. china beat blog
5. leslie t. chang
6. rana mitter
7. obama china
8. china
9. chinabeat
10. wolf totem

Top ten countries of origin for China Beat visitors:
1. United States
2. China
3. Canada
4. United Kingdom
5. Australia
6. Hong Kong
7. Germany
8. Taiwan
9. Singapore
10. Japan

Magic Lanterns

In the midst of this year's bitter winter, a glimmer of hope shines through: the Lunar New Year is rapidly approaching: New Year's Eve (除夕) is on January 25, followed by New Year's Day (初一) on the 26th. In Taiwan, one of the main events marking this holiday is the annual Taiwan Lantern Festival (台灣燈會), which is now entering its twentieth season. This year's Festival is timed to start on February 9, which also happens to be the date of the traditional Lantern Festival (元宵節, also known as 上元節 or the more popular 小過年), celebrated on the fifteen day of the first lunar month. It will be held in Yilan 宜蘭 County over a two-week period, marking the first time that this event has been staged on the island's east coast.

Visitors to the festival (as well as the mass media) pay special attention to the Festival's main theme lantern (主燈). Because next year will be the Year of the Ox, the new theme lantern is a movable golden-colored statue of the Taiwanese Water Buffalo (台灣水牛; representing the perseverance and dedication Taiwan's citizens), which towers over 14 meters in height atop a 4.3 meter high pedestal. This particular theme lantern will also be measured against its mighty predecessor of 12 years ago, a giant ox that weighed in at 13,950 kilos, earning a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. However, one wonders if the fate of this year's theme lantern will be any different from those before it, most of which have ended up being left to rust and rot. In addition to the theme lantern, approximately 130,000 handheld lanterns called Starlight Ox (星光牛) will be distributed to visitors, especially children.

Apart from all lanterns great and small, one conspicuous feature of the Taiwan Lantern Festival is corporate sponsorship (and the accumulation of symbolic capital). For example, this year's theme lantern has been sponsored by Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信), while lanterns at previous festivals have been donated by the Grand Hotel (圓山大飯店), the Grand Formosa Regent (台北晶華酒店), and the Fubon Group (富邦集團). Another aspect of the Festival involves marketing. This year's event, for example, will promote sales of renowned products like Pinglin Baozhong Tea (坪林包種茶) and Dragonfly Glazed Beads from Pingtung (屏東蜻蜓雅築). Similar phenomena have marked the staging of earlier Taiwan Lantern Festivals, the first of which was organized by the Tourism Bureau (觀光局) in 1990 as part of a set of activities known as Tourism Week. The festivities have grown exponentially over time, with celebrations like the 2007 Lantern Festival in Chiayi 嘉義 and the 2003 Lantern Festival in Taichung 台中 attracting tens of thousands of people (resulting in massive traffic jams), not to mention leading politicians who take part in the lantern-lighting ceremonies. The cost of a theme lantern has risen as well, and now exceeds NT$10 million (approximately US$300,000).

All this indicates that the Taiwan Lantern Festival is both a major celebration and big business. Even more interestingly, however, it represents one instance of how Chinese officials and elites have attempted to "secularize" what had originally been a highly religious event. Standard representations of the Lantern Festival today tend to emphasize the importance of children carrying decorative lanterns, games of "guessing lantern riddles" (猜燈謎), and the consumption of dumplings known as yuanxiao 元宵 (after 元宵節) or tangyuan 湯圓. Such depictions also feature legends about the Festival's origins, the most commonly cited of which involve tricking the Jade Emperor (玉皇大帝) into believing that a village had been punished by fire, or a means of showing respect for the Buddha by a historical emperor. The religious aspects of the Lantern Festival continue to thrive in Taiwan, however (see below).

It also striking that recent news reports claimed that the Tourism Bureau was planning to terminate its role in hosting the Taiwan Lantern Festival. Such reports were quickly denied, with leading government officials announcing instead that plans were in the works for encouraging local groups (including non-governmental ones) to assume sponsorship of the Festival. If this proves to be the case, it would signify a remarkable shift of the Lantern Festival back to its origins, when it was a "popular" ritual in every sense of the word. For example, as John Lagerwey and his Chinese colleagues have shown in their path-breaking Traditional Hakka Society Series (客家傳統社會叢書), the traditional Lantern Festival consisted of numerous religious events (including enormous dragon lantern processions (遊龍燈)), most of which had as their goal the rejuvenation of vital yang 陽 forces, with the word for lanterns (燈) being roughly homophonous with that for sons (丁) in numerous southern dialects, including Cantonese, Hakka, and Minnan.

For hundreds (if not thousands) of years then, the Lantern Festival was a radiant ritual held to celebrate light and life. All this changed during the early years of the twentieth century, with recent research by Prasenjit Duara, Vincent Goossaert, Rebecca Nedostup, and David Palmer showing that one aspect of KMT and CCP campaigns against "superstition" (迷信) involved the suppression of most traditional festivals, with a select few (including Lunar New Year celebrations like the Lantern Festival) being bestowed modern connotations and incorporated into a new Gregorian calendar enacted in 1912. In fact, prior to the Tomb-sweeping Festival (清明節) and Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節) being declared public holidays in China just last year, the Lunar New Year had the distinction of being the only traditional festival that had continuously enjoyed government recognition. The religious aspects of the Lantern Festival declined over time, and it became instead merely an occasion for lanterns to be displayed on the streets and in temples, or carried around by children.

All this changed in Taiwan beginning in the late 1980s due to this nation's democratization, economic development, and increasing recognition of the legitimacy and value of indigenous cultural traditions. The realization on the part of officials and local elites that festivals could enhance the tourism industry provided an added incentive for their revival. As a result, many ritual events held on the date of the traditional Lantern Festival have experienced phenomenal growth in popularity.


One example is the Fireworks Festival held in the village of Yenshui 鹽水 (Tainan County), which is said to have been first staged back in 1875 as part of plague expulsion rituals involving the deity Guangong 關公. The most renowned aspect of this festival is the "bee hive" fireworks (蜂炮), which consist of bamboo frames holding hundreds of bottle rockets that are set off simultaneously, providing an opportunity for thrill-seeking tourists to test their bravado (not unlike the running of the bulls during the festival of San Fermin in Pamploma).

Another fiery Lantern Festival rite is Taitung 台東's "Blasting Lord Handan" (炮炸寒單爺), held in honor of the local God of Wealth (財神). As Avron Boretz has shown, this festival is especially noteworthy for its powerful expressions of the yang 陽 forces of masculinity and virility, as it features the participation of half-naked young men (many of whom have gangster backgrounds<) who impersonate the god. Riding atop open palanquins, they are subjected to being bombarded with firecrackers thrown by the locals, all ostensibly in the interest of a prosperous New Year.

The renowned Pingsi Sky Lanterns (平溪天燈) festival of northern Taiwan, also held on the traditional date of the Lantern Festival, further emphasizes the importance of fire, albeit in a less obviously religious context. Legend has it that during the Qing dynasty this area suffered from attacks by robbers and aboriginal peoples, prompting residents to use sky lanterns as a form of signaling to their friends and relatives. This local custom has now grown into a major international event attracting tens of thousands of people who release countless sky lanterns covered with wishes for good fortune, despite concerns about their environmental impact (see below).

The religious aspects of the Lantern Festival are also making a comeback in parts of China. One example involves the revival of a centuries-old festival in the town of Pucheng 蒲城 (Zhejiang Province), which I describe in an article originally published in the Journal of Ritual Studies Journal of Ritual Studies and subsequently reprinted in the volume Asian Ritual Systems. Pucheng's festival is timed to overlap with Lunar New Year festivities, particularly the Lantern Festival. Although it is generally referred to as the “Nocturnal Battle” (ba wugeng 拔五更) after a nighttime exorcistic rite and relay race held near its conclusion, the entire festival lasts two weeks, from the 4th to 17th days of the 1st lunar month. Banned during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the festival was revived in the early 1980s and has grown more elaborate by the year.

In Taiwan, the revival and breathtaking growth of traditional festive events coinciding with the Lantern Festival has not been without its challenges. In Taitung, for example, the prominence of gangsters (as well as the brothels that helped sponsor the event) prompted the authorities to ban the Blasting Lord Handan festival between 1983 and 1989, and it was only allowed to be performed after local leaders signed an agreement to oversee the behavior of potentially problematic participants. These rites gained added legitimacy beginning in 2001 as a result of their performance at state-sponsored cultural events, as well as in the presence of visiting dignitaries from Taiwan's remaining diplomatic allies like Palau. In the case of Pingsi, a fascinating article published last year in the International Herald Tribune details how Taiwan's Environmental Protection Agency (行政院環境保護署) set up its own "virtual sky lantern" website in order to encourage people to release digital lanterns rather than real ones, a decision prompted by the fact that many sky lanterns end up littering the countryside. One particularly misguided missile ignited a blaze near the Taoyuan International Airport, with the smoke forcing officials to temporarily close down a runway. This policy, which resembles efforts to ban Mid-Autumn Festival barbeques (see my previous post), promote the burning of "virtual" paper money, and discourage the slaughter of divine pigs (神豬), also represents the on-going tensions between "modern" ideals and "traditional" practices, which in the case of Pingsi is further complicated by the fact the sky lanterns represent a sizeable source of income for local residents.

Even the state-sponsored Taiwan Lantern Festival is not immune from the influence of popular beliefs. One report recently published in the China Times cited as an example the "Flying Tiger" theme lantern (飛天虎主燈) of 1998. When this lantern was first lit, its glowing green eyes were viewed by many as an ill omen, and sure enough once it was moved to the east coast following the festival the area was plagued by a series of air disasters. Local officials then pulled the tiger's teeth, but this was followed by numerous auto accidents, so a geomancer was brought in to remedy the problem (which ceased to be a problem once the lantern was shredded by the mighty winds of Typhoon Bilis in 2001). A second example occurred in 2001, the first time the festival was held outside of Taipei (in Kaohsiung). The theme lantern for that year (the Year of the Snake) was a mythical creature known as an aolong 鰲龍 (part dragon, part sea turtle). Some were reminded of the Qing military commander Oboi 鰲拜 (1610?-1669), and wondered if that lantern would shape the career of then mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷). His presidential ambitions have yet to be realized.

So enjoy the beauty of the Lantern Festival, as well as the guessing games and of course the dumplings. But do keep in mind the ritual facets of this holiday, especially what they can tell us about the power of light to overcome darkness and despair.

The 10 Best Books about Chinese Women in 2008

Note: these books appear in no particular order since all are excellent.

1. Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Stanford University Press. Focusing on the so-called “woman question” (funü wenti) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Judge re-examines China’s turn-of-the-century pursuit of modernity through analysis of biographies of notable women that illustrate Chinese approaches to their own history and to the Western world as mediated through Japan.

2. Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. University of California Press (2007). Mann cleverly reconstructs the lives of women in the elite Zhang family of Changzhou from the Taiping Rebellion through the Boxer Uprising and demonstrates that the oft-maligned “talented woman” (cainü) of the late imperial period was directly linked to the oft-celebrated “new woman” (xinnüxing) of the Republican era.

3. Anne Walthall, ed. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History. University of California Press. The two articles on women in the Song and Qing courts appear alongside articles on palace women in Nigeria, Mexico, France, Korea, Japan, and the Mughal and Ottoman empires, to mention but a few. This expansive collection, edited by UC Irvine’s own Anne Walthall, affords the first comprehensive review of the women who served in royal courts and palaces around the world, and thereby offers a welcome correction to our androcentric understanding of monarchies.

4. Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. Columbia University Press. This beautifully illustrated book covers Chinese fashion from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) through the 1990s, with delightful analysis of how gender, class, and nationalism have influenced Chinese fashions through the ages.

5. Harriet Evans, The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China. Rowman & Littlefield. Evans interviewed hundreds of urban women in contemporary China, and her book charts the sociological effects of urbanization on family life and personal identity through the lens of the emotionally potent mother-daughter relationship.

6. Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China. University of California Press (2007). Winner of the 2007 John King Fairbank book award, this book is worthy of recognition in 2008 as well. It follows the crime and trial of Shi Jianqiao, who in 1935 avenged her militarist father’s death by assassinating the warlord Sun Chuanfang. Even more compelling than this thrilling story is what Lean does with it, as she analyzes Shi Jianqiao’s marshalling of public sympathies for filial daughters in order to win eventual amnesty from the Nationalist state, and ultimately demonstrates “the rise of popular sympathy in Republican China.”

7. Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. Trans. Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan. Columbia University Press. Winner of the 2000 Mao Dun Literature Award, this 1995 novel from the well-known Shanghai novelist came out in English translation this past year. Beginning in 1945 Shanghai, in the sliver of time between wartime Japanese occupation and Communist liberation, the novel traces the steps of one Miss Shanghai as she travels through the longtang alleyways of everyday Shanghai and observes the lives of its occupants, which she traces through 1986 (though with a slight jump over the Cultural Revolution decade of 1966-76).

8. Lijia Zhang, Socialism is Great! Atlas and Co. Journalist and freelance writer Zhang narrates the boredom and hilarity of her life as a munitions factory worker in Nanjing, where she becomes infatuated with an aloof young man partly as a means to escape her boredom, and her eventual leadership of worker protests in 1989.

9. Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Chatto & Windus. This inventive novel that also poses as a Chinese language textbook follows the romance between Z, a 20-year-old girl who left her village in China for London, and her 44-year-old bisexual, ex-anarchist vegetarian British boyfriend. Like the film “Lost in Translation,” the story explores belonging, alienation, and the missed communication that we often attribute to cultural differences but that exists between any two individual minds.

10. Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. Spiegel and Grau. Drawn in part from Chang’s journalism with The Wall Street Journal, Factory Girls traces the lives of two teenaged girls-- among China’s 130-million-strong “floating population” of migrant workers (that is likely much larger!). Interwoven with their story is that of Chang’s own family and their immigration to the U.S. two generations before her.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

The last year is gone, and 2009 predictions are rolling in. Here are a few of our favorite 2008 wrap-ups and 2009 predictions from the past few weeks.

Looking back…

1. China Beat’s Jeffrey Wasserstrom has posted a few of his own reflections on 2009. At the Christian Science Monitor, Wasserstrom wrote about “the two big China stories you missed this year” (though regular China Beat readers likely won’t have…!). The subheading should tip you off to these two stories: “The brief yet radical shift of patriotic fervor into criticism of the government after the Sichuan earthquake and the official revival of Confucius were crucial moments in a pivotal year.”

And at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Wasserstrom discussed how 2008 had showcased a new “golden age” of English-language reportage on China:

The year saw a bumper crop of unusually illuminating books of reportage. The four works I have in mind take widely varying approaches to contemporary China. What they have in common is that each is by someone with good Chinese language skills, has a long-term commitment to understanding China on its own terms, and has hit upon an interesting way to frame a book. Each offers readers a valuable opportunity to move beyond simplistic visions of China that downplay the diversity of the country and the complex nature of the social and cultural shifts its people are experiencing.

Make the jump to find out the four works Wasserstrom singled out for notice.

2. Access Asia (if you aren’t already reading their weekly updates, you should be…) published a 2008 retrospectives on the best and worst of books on China in 2008 (republished at Danwei.org):

It was hardly a stellar year – there were no really big picture books this year that stormed the shelves, though there were a few interesting memoirs (Rowan Simons’s Bamboo Goalposts and Zhang Lijia’s Socialism is Great! both deserve a mention) but not one good business book. 2008 was a good year for general history though as reflected in our choices below.

3. China Digital Times has been publishing regular wrap-ups on the China issues of 2008, including this one on food and product safety:

In 2008, food and product safety issues that had been smoldering in China finally erupted in a rash of scandals, most having to do with melamine-tainting in food products such as milk, eggs, ammonium bicarbonate, protein powder, and animal feed, but also including food poisoned with pesticides, a maggot outbreak in oranges, hazardous toys, and toxic furniture.

Other CDT wrap-ups include China and the Developing World, Nationalism, Internet Culture, and Identity, Environmental Crisis, The Global Financial Crisis, the Revaluation of the Yuan, Human Rights, and China’s domestic market.

Looking forward…

1. In talking about what China will look like in 2009, the recent economic woes have loomed large. At Reuters, Chris Buckley argues for rising unrest in the coming year :

While foreign commentary about risks to China's recipe of fast economic growth and one-party control are common, the nation's leaders are usually reticent about such threats.

This report and other recent open warnings may be intended to help snap officials to attention, said one Chinese expert.

"The candor about these problems reflects the severity of the unemployment problem. It's meant to attract the attention of all levels of government," said Mao Shoulong, a professor of public policy at Renmin University in Beijing.

"The government wants to show that stability is at the top of its agenda."

Many China commentators, however, are concerned that the unrest (and its potential for government destabilization) is being overstated and may blind foreigners to the true situation in China. In reaction to predictions over the importance of Charter ’08 (and its contribution to bringing down Beijing), Mutant Palm blogged on “‘To Collapse or Not to Collapse’ is Not the Question,” pointing to rising citizen demands on the government for social services as the likeliest outcome of an economic downturn.

2. At this week’s Access Asia weekly update, editors posted “The China Retail Quarterly...The “What Will 2009 Be Like?” Edition.”

3. In addition to reflecting on 2008, Jeff Wasserstrom also had time to make a few predictions for 2009 at the Nation. The upshot? It all happened already. Take a gander to see how many of the events China specialists might have been predicting for 2009 took place in 2008.

4. For a view to how one Chinese newspaper (Southern Weekend) looks forward to 2009, see CDT’s full translation of the paper’s New Year editorial, which ranges across both the newspaper’s responsibilities to its readers and readers’ responsibilities to their nation:

The more we look to the depths of history, the firmer we are. Yes, we want to support those common human values unwaveringly. We support progress, democracy, freedom, human rights; we support China’s move toward modern civilisation. Do we not recall how, over a century ago, our predecessors found that being complacent in their own culture would not save them, so hiding their pain deep inside, they undertook a long journey to find a way to revitalise the country? Therefore western winds blew eastward, arsenals were built to ward off external humiliation, schools built with a view to the future, to build the newspaper for the opening of their wisdom, and Mr Democracy and Mr Science brought the light of rejuvenation to this ancient country. At this juncture of our long history, have we not thought about where this country’s hope comes from? Have we never thought about how to extend the hope, so as not get the future path of state and the people wrong?

It’s worth reading the whole editorial in full.

Ying Ruocheng

The Top Ten Things You Probably Don't Know About China's Celebrated Actor

By Claire Conceison

During the final three years of his life, I collaborated with Ying Ruocheng on his autobiography in English. Sitting by his bedside, he captivated me with stories from his imprisonment, education, childhood, and his careers on stage and screen as well as in political and cultural diplomacy. His resulting autobiography, entitled Voices Carry, is an unusually witty narrative that includes vivid accounts of the events listed below and many more…


1. He was chosen by Bernardo Bertolucci to star in his film The Last Emperor after Bertolucci saw him play the role of Kublai Khan in the 1982 NBC miniseries Marco Polo.

2. His grandfather, Ying Lianzhi, founded the Dagongbao newspaper in Tianjin (now in Hong Kong) and Furen University in Beijing (now in Taiwan), and was knighted by Pope Pius XII for his impact on Catholic education in China.

3. His father, Ying Qianli, was imprisoned twice by the Japanese during the occupation, and then taken to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek in the late 1940s, where he became a prominent scholar at Taiwan National University until his death in 1969.

4. His son, media celebrity Ying Da, is host of several talk shows for CCTV, creator of the wildly popular 1990s sitcom Wo ai wo jia (I Love My Home), and a featured actor in Chen Kai-ge’s new film about the life of Mei Lanfang.

5. He was a founding member of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, where he starred as Pock-mark Liu in the 1958 staging and 1979 revivals of Lao She’s masterpiece Teahouse, and translated the play into English for its touring productions abroad. (He also translated plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Miller, Cao Yu, and others.)

6. He spent a decade of his childhood in Prince Qing’s palace, and acquired his remarkable English skills in missionary schools during his youth, but his first travel abroad was not until 1980 at the age of 51.

7. He was imprisoned for three years during the Cultural Revolution due to the suspicion that he was a spy, and while in prison kept a secret notebook with interrogation notes, information about other prisoners, and portraits and poetry of Chairman Mao.

8. He instituted bold reforms as China’s vice minister of culture (under Minister of Culture Wang Meng) from 1986-1990, selected for the post by Hu Yaobang.

9. He brought Arthur Miller to China in 1983 to direct his translation of Death of a Salesman, also playing “a brilliant Willy Loman” (Miller, Salesman in Beijing, 1984).

Arthur Miller and Ying Ruocheng in Beijing, 1983.
Photo by Inge Morath. Courtesy of the Inge Morath Foundation, New York.
10. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver in 1994 and died in December 2003 at Peking Union Medical Center Hospital, having just completed a new translation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (which was staged by Lin Zhaohua in 2007, starring Pu Cunxin in the title role).

Claire Conceison is associate professor of drama at Tufts University and an associate-in-research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Ying Ruocheng’s autobiography Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) is available at Rowman & Littlefield and Amazon.com.

In Case You Missed It: Big White Lie

By Peter Zarrow

I want to share some impressions of a book that the sinologically inclined (like me) might otherwise ignore. Big White Lie, by John Fitzgerald, is most importantly a polemic about Australian history—subtitled “Chinese Australians in White Australia”—but it also has a lot to say about modern Chinese culture, politics, and business. What follows is not a systematic review but a few xinde: somewhat random and incomplete notes on what I got out of the book.

The study of overseas Chinese has always seemed to me like an orphan field—an interesting and important area of research that has long produced major scholarship, but lacking a home of its own. In the post-war American universities, it didn’t quite fit into Asian studies—sometimes researchers didn’t even know how to read classical Chinese!—nor history departments with their national pigeonholes. None of this prevented a rapid growth of the field (or subfield?), perhaps in part because of the rise of identity politics, at least in the case of the United States, since the 1970s. And there is no doubt today that more recent academic trends in global history (and real-life trends in international business), are showing up the inadequacies of national history, and the importance of diaspora studies. About a decade ago, one of its masters, Wang Gungwu, suggested that overseas Chinese studies couldn’t be just one thing: he highlighted the differences among the various Chinese communities that had emerged outside of China and the need for comparative work on them.

Whether overseas Chinese studies will become a key part of sinology, as Wang thinks, and a sub-field of ethnic and minority studies, as he hopes, remains to be seen. An explicitly comparative approach was followed by Adam McKeown in a stimulating attempt to break out of the national framework.[1] By highlighting the role of Chinese in the global circulation of people, goods, and money and Chinese networks in both local and transnational contexts, McKeown is able to transcend the limitations of national history and the “settler versus sojourner” debate of traditional migrant studies. Whether more assimilated or more tied to transnational Chinese networks (or of course both), Chinese migrants and their descendents around the world have always been active participants in constructing their identities.

As well, recent work has emphasized (or reemphasized) the roles that Chinese migrants played in China itself. This view highlights the maintenance of connections and networks among the overseas Chinese and between overseas Chinese and family and businesses back home. The turn to overseas Chinese studies by "mainstream" China historians like Philip A. Kuhn may presage a more general recognition “that neither Chinese history lacking emigration nor emigration lacking the history of China is a self-sufficient field of study” (p. 5). Here, migration emerges as a strategy for family survival in economically pressing circumstances. And in the modern era, from the turn of the twentieth century, Kuhn shows the political appeal of Chinese nationalism for overseas Chinese, who were to one degree or another isolated among larger host populations.

Fitzgerald’s Big White Lie is not primarily aimed at cataloging the contributions of Chinese-Australians to the development of Australia, though there is some of that. Nor is it aimed at discussing their contributions to China, though we learn a good deal about that as well. Rather, Fitzgerald wants to show exactly how Chinese migrants shared so-called Australian values (really universal values), in spite of attempts to exclude them. Australians, especially elites, appear to have been less crudely racist than Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, but they argued that an unchanging Chinese culture was hierarchical and slavish. Chinese thus could never fit in with the culture of (supposedly) free, egalitarian, and individualistic Australia. And this “big white lie” is maintained even today by historians who attribute White Australia policies to an underlying clash of national values.

Fitzgerald argues that all you have to do is listen a moment to actual Chinese Australian voices, to hear their commitment to freedom, equality, and fraternal solidarity. Taking “mateship” and “fair go” as the local Australian idiom for these universal principles, and adding what he regards as an implicit Australian value—the yearning for respectability—Fitzgerald finds these principles were just as attractive to Chinese migrants as to European migrants or the native-born. It is true that many Chinese migrating to Australia in the nineteenth century were not initially familiar with the terms “freedom” and “equality,” but the irony is that it was Australian whites who excluded the Chinese from their scope. That did not stop the Chinese from founding town clubs, Masonic fraternities, workers’ brotherhoods—and, yes, secret societies—that were expressions of community solidarity. Such organizations were far from absolutely egalitarian (any more than their white counterparts), but Fitzgerald’s point is that they shared “similar myths about similar values” (p. 29).

Anti-Chinese discrimination was hardly unique to Australia, but again in contrast with the United States, as well as New Zealand and Canada, in Australia it was intimately tied to the nation-building program that came with Federation, or independence from Britain, in 1901. Australian identity was thus perceived to emerge from a clash of cultures—egalitarianism and freedom versus the intolerance and despotism of the lands to the north (as well as with the British class system).

In historical fact, Chinese migration was severely restricted but never quite cut off, and Chinese Australian argued vociferously, if futilely, for their legitimate place in a land of freedom. White Australians, perhaps especially the labor movement as in other white settler societies, claimed the Chinese were indentured workers willing to work under slave-like conditions and wages. In fact, Fitzgerald shows, while indentured labor existed in colonial settings, migrants to Australia were largely individuals who (or whose families) may have borrowed funds for their passage but who were free laborers, miners, and farm hands.

The involvement of overseas Chinese in the anti-Manchu revolutionary movement of the early twentieth century is well-known, and certainly included many Chinese-Australians. Some also became radical labor leaders in the ensuing decades, with ties to the Guomindang, before the party turned rightward. Many, even with strict White Australian policies in place, were able to travel back and forth to China, and establish successful businesses. At the same time, Chinese Australians were often full members of their communities—footballers, soldiers, and Freemasons as well as gold-miners and greengrocers. They had enthusiastically supported federation because they understood it as a step forward in human freedom. However, they imagined a continuation of the norms of the British empire, which at least allowed travel and commerce within its vast territories. The loss of these rights as a new Australia firmed up its borders as a White outpost, strikes one as a double tragedy—for an Australia that might have become a more dynamic place as well as for individual Chinese deprived, for example, of their businesses. Fitzgerald’s account, though, is certainly not one of victimization. Chinese Australians still built major Australian institutions, not to mention several of the great department stories of Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong, which so enriched the Republic of China’s commercial culture as well as the investors. Yet the book neglects the Chinese Australians who never became “successes.”

It is perhaps not a coincidence that Fitzgerald was a student of Wang Gungwu, an Australian, and a mainstream China historian himself. Big White Lie has a great deal to offer China historians—from insightful discussions on Liang Qichao, who visited Australia at the time of federation, to Australia’s fateful role in the machinations of the Versailles Peace Conference, to a new (to me) view of the Guomindang as a thoroughly internationalized organization. This book has even more to say about Australian history, including the Chinese side of the ancient Sydney-Melbourne rivalry that I reckon few Australians know about. More importantly, it should force Australians to rethink the very basis of their national identity. When I taught in Australia in the late 1990s, many of my students were Asians fairly fresh off the boat. Embarrassingly, I took this to be the case with one student who turned out to be fourth-generation Chinese-Australian. He wasn’t a very good student, but perhaps that just proved how thoroughly assimilated his family had become to that other Australian value, leisure.


References:
John Fitzgerald. Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008.

Kuhn, Philip A. Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

McKeown, Adam. Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Wang Gungwu. “The State of Overseas Chinese Studies.” In Wang Ling-chi and Wang Gungwu, eds., The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays. Singapore: Eastern University Press, Times Media Private, 2003, vol. 1, pp. 1-17.

[1] McKeown does not see his research as comparative in the social scientific sense of isolating variables that explain differences (p. 24), but I take his work, based on in-depth analysis of Chinese communities in three locations, to be comparative in a broader sense of the term.

China Beat at the AHA

Several China Beat contributors have just returned from the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held this year in New York City from January 2-5. While there was normal association business aplenty (including presenting historical research, catching up with colleagues from other institutions, and for some of us hearing Eugenia Lean give a stimulating talk after the Conference on Asian History's luncheon, in which she explored the interplay between science and gender in the Republican period), the meeting also gave the editors of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance a chance to sit down with Rowman & Littlefield editor Susan McEachern to chat about the book's final months of production.


Jeff Wasserstrom, Susan McEachern, Kate Merkel-Hess, and Ken Pomeranz
Meeting over breakfast, we talked about the final pieces still to finish (a highlight: Ken Pomeranz's "Afterword" that takes stock of the event-filled final months of 2008 and draws attention to some environmental issues that don't always get the attention they deserve) as well as more pragmatic issues like how to promote the book (we'll be flogging it in various locations and will give you plenty of heads up in advance, in case you'd like to join us at any signings and the like). It's rare for turn-around on a book to be quite this quick--we're planning a mid-March launch--but it certainly suits the timeliness of the blog format.

In the meantime, we've received a couple blurbs for China in 2008 that we want to share with you:

“Required reading for anyone trying to make sense of China’s tumultuous year. This is the literary equivalent of a rowdy dinner party attended by some of the best and brightest China journalists, scholars, and thinkers. It offers a breadth of opinion and depth of context available only to those with a well-thumbed Rolodex of China specialists. But the book is accessible to the ordinary reader, and it combines the up-to-the-minute excitement of a blog with quirky academic takes on history in the making.”
—Louisa Lim, National Public Radio, Shanghai correspondent

“I’ve never been to China, but I’ve become a China-watcher thanks to the wonderful China Beat blog. This book is the best of that blog—and more. It’s a fascinating way to get under China’s skin.”
—Mary Beard, University of Cambridge (a leading Classicist and the blogger responsible for "A Don's Life")

More China Writing in Surprising Places: Japan Focus

For quite some time, the online journal Japan Focus has been moving toward covering Asia more generally, and recently it made that shift official with its new name, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. In our series of lists of “surprising places to find great writing on China,” this is perhaps not the most shocking as it is coordinated by Mark Selden, whose first book, The Yenan Way, is on every China specialist’s exam reading list (and who has published widely in the last thirty years on China, Japan, and Asia).

So here is a list of five sample pieces from The Asia-Pacific Journal that prove how much good China writing happens there—but you can find even more by visiting the homepage and searching titles for “China” or “Chinese.”

1. Ashes of the American Raj in China: John Leighton Stuart, Pearl S. Buck, and Edgar Snow, by Charles Hayford

Hayford is a regular blogger at Frog in a Well and has contributed several pieces to China Beat as well (such as his postings on “Wiki-ing China” in October). One of his persistent research interests in recent years has been the relationship between Americans and Chinese in the early twentieth century (particularly Americans who shaped US impressions of China—for instance, see “What’s So Bad About the Good Earth?” and “When is a Farmer not a Farmer?”) In this piece, Hayford examines the three title Americans in the following context:

All three played roles in an informal but real American Raj in China partly modeled on the British Raj in India and partly reacting against its imperial arrogance and racism.

This Raj developed in the early twentieth century after the Boxer Rebellion provoked not only a ruthless allied intervention but also the Open Door notes. Diplomatically, the Open Door asked the other great powers to maintain free trade in their zones of influence; culturally, the Open Door echoed the famous goals President McKinley set for colonial rule in the Philippines: “To uplift, civilize, and Christianize.” The Open Door Raj assumed that when the doors were open and restraints removed, China would naturally follow the American path to democracy, prosperity and Christianity.

2. Red Shanghai, Blue Shanghai, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

In this piece, Wasserstrom reflects on the complicated position of Shanghai—a city that looks both in and out, celebrating both Communism (“red”) and internationalism (“blue”). As Wasserstrom writes:

Twenty years ago, while some guidebooks in Western languages presented Shanghai’s allure as tied to its glamorous treaty-port era incarnation as a cosmopolitan “Paris of the East,” the ones in Chinese simply took it for granted that the city’s importance lay in its contributions to the Revolution. No Chinese reader needed to be reminded then that Shanghai had a “red” side. The treaty-port era was presented in domestic guidebooks of the time as a period of humiliation, when Chinese were treated as second-class citizens within a part of their own country and evil imperialists exploited the local population.

In recent years, this vision of the past has changed dramatically. Chinese and Western guidebooks alike celebrate the city’s “blue” sites—whether old ones like the Custom House and Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and other landmarks of the Bund, such as the Peace Hotel, or new ones like the futuristic German-engineered high speed magnetic levitation train across the river in Pudong (East Shanghai).

3. Mirrors of History: On a Sino-Japanese Moment and Some Antecedents, Geremie R. Barmé.

This piece by Barmé was written just after the anti-Japanese protests of spring 2005 and reflects on the uses of history in China and the way understanding and misunderstanding (some purposeful, some not) laid the groundwork for the complicated Sino-Japanese relationship:

Facing up to history, respecting history, learning the lessons of history are all themes of both official and popular protests against Japan’s officially-sanctioned textbooks, the visits of government officials to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo and the perceived failure of Japan as a nation to show full and continued contrition for the acts of imperial aggression throughout East and Southeast Asia before and during WWII.

I remember well as a young scholar living in Kyoto in 1982 hearing about and then being party to the heated discussions of Chinese students at Kyoto University when the first ructions regarding Japanese high-school textbooks appeared. The texts being protested against then used the vocabulary of modest obfuscation to describe the egregious acts of aggression in China, in particular at the time of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the bloody occupation of Nanjing and the invasion of East China. Such popular discontent has been a feature of the creation of the ‘public’ since the end of the Cultural Revolution. The outrage and despair felt by Chinese colleagues then has, in later generations, only grown as new texts, even if only marginal within the Japanese education system, feed into a perception that China’s neighbour continues to avoid confronting its—albeit imperial—past. There is an abiding—and even mounting—sentiment that ‘Japan’ continues to be insensitive to the feelings of others in the region in regard to that past, and that it is a nation that is incapable of redressing those wrongs through meaningful, substantive and sustained acts and expressions of official contrition. This is also despite the fact that the issue of comfort women and the atrocities in Nanjing are now mentioned in some texts, even if inadequately. At the same time, continuous regional unease and even hostility towards Japan appears to have encouraged and legitimated a resurgence of neo-nationalism in Japan itself.

4. US Power/US Decline and US-China Relations, Wang Jisi interviewed by Zhao Lingmin

Wang Jisi is Dean of International Studies at Beijing University and an important commentator on US politics and US-China relations (see, for instance, his 2005 Foreign Affairs article, “China’s Search for Stability with America” or his 2003 piece, translated from Chinese, “The Logic of American Hegemony”). This interview ranges widely over economic issues, Sino-American relations, and the reasons for the international influence of American ideas. For instance, one exchange:

NFC: What is your assessment of "Pax Americana"? If the United States declines, what will happen to the world? And as far as China is concerned, what are the pros and cons of US hegemony?

Wang: The so-called "Pax Americana" does to a certain degree benefit international stability, but this is a peace achieved by power politics that has sacrificed the rights and interests of other countries. It is morally unfair, unjust, and is also very difficult to sustain for a long time. Speaking in theoretical terms, a multipolar world will be more just than a unipolar one, but it is certain that it will not be very stable. Is not achieving both justice and stability easier said than done? In a situation in which there is no better substitute, as far as China is concerned, the workable approach is to acknowledge the existing international order and, amid that, safeguard its own rights and interests as much as possible. This not only includes struggling with US hegemony, it also includes the other aspect of coordinating and cooperating with the United States, working together to deal with nuclear proliferation, climate change, energy shortages, and other such problems. This is also what we commonly refer to as "fighting dual tactics with dual tactics." The United States' ability to maintain its leading position in the world in overall national power must have some lessons that other countries might learn from. For example, in some countries the ethnic, religious, and sectarian conflicts are very intense, and some ethnic groups are militating for independence. US society is becoming more and more diverse internally, and there are also several million to tens of millions of Muslims, but there have been no real threats of national break-up or religious clashes. The United States always wants to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries, but other countries also want to intervene in US affairs. For example, sending people to the US to lobby Congress, and the public in quite a few other countries has taken a position supporting the election of Obama, etc. However, the United States does not worry much about other countries discussing its domestic affairs.

5. Taiwan in the Chinese Imagination, 17th–19th Centuries, Emma Jinhua Teng

A professor of foreign languages and literatures at MIT, Teng here explores the topic of her first book, Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895, where she considers that:

The Qing incorporation of this island involved not only a reconsideration of Taiwan’s place in imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of the Chinese domain itself. The Ming conviction that Taiwan was not part of this domain was rooted in the traditional conception of China as a territory bounded by natural geographic features, such as mountains, rivers, the desert, and the sea. Since Taiwan was separated from the Chinese mainland by the Taiwan Strait, it was, ergo, outside China. The Qing expansion into territory “beyond the seas” entailed a shift from the established conception of China to a new spatial image of an empire that transgressed the traditional boundaries.

Global Shanghai's Futuristic Side

I'm writing this in 2008, but when you read it, the calendar will tell you it is 2009.  That wouldn't ordinarily be particularly noteworthy, since many blogs, including this one, alternate between running things just as they are written and scheduling them to appear a few days hence.  It just seemed relevant to mention because two pieces I've recently had go up online that are linked to and provide teasers for Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 deal with time and forward-looking issues.

One is the concluding segment of a Danwei.org two-parter on Shanghai and visions of the future.  This installment focuses on sci-fi writings with ties to that city, with passing nods to a couple of films, a fantasy poster that imagines Shanghai hosting a World's Fair in the 25th century, and the actual World's Fair set to take place there in 2010.  It has something to offer fans of Neal Stephenson and other cyberpunk authors.  But it also, perhaps less expectedly for at least some but not all readers of this blog, spends some time talking about a story written by the late Qing and Republican era intellectual heavyweight Liang Qichao, which has been analyzed insightfully by John Fitzgerald in a fascinating Thesis 11 article.

My other recent online Global Shanghai-related publication with a futuristic dimension was one I did for the wonderfully varied History News Network site.   Befitting an essay aimed more at historians and those interested in the past than China-focused readers per se, it explores the question of why someone belonging to the presumably backward-looking academic guild of which I am a member would include a date set in the future, 2010, in the title of a book.

There's a bit of other Global Shanghai news to report since my last SPS post, including two reviews I am very pleased with that can be accessed here and here. I've also got two other book teasers of a sort up on the web, each on sites I like a great deal.   One appeared on the Campaign for the American Reader website, as part of their "Page 99 Test" feature.  Their invitation to focus on that page gave me the challenge of reflecting anew about the chapter in the book dealing with the year 1975, which was in many ways the most difficult one for me to write.  The other was written for The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.  I won't say anything more about that here, however, as China Beat will be running a post tomorrow (the tomorrow of this piece's publication, not the tomorrow of my writing these words) devoted exclusively to emphasizing how much interesting China-related material that venue, which originally concentrated more tightly on Japan, has been carrying.

2008 Retrospective: Olympics in Taiwan

China Beat will be running a series of 2008 retrospectives over the coming weeks--pieces that both look back at events of the year (some well-trod ground, others largely unnoticed) as well as tying those earlier events into on-going trends and situations. In this piece, Jennifer Liu reflects on Taiwan's 2008 Olympic experience, memories of which take on a different hue in light of Taiwan's tumultuous autumn.

By Jennifer Liu

Olympic fever still hasn’t waned in China (especially in Beijing), but when I was living in Taiwan this summer, it seemed Olympic excitement had already run its course or maybe it never even took off. While China was gripped by Olympic fever, its “rogue province” took a much more detached attitude to the proceedings. According to Nielsen’s ratings, China, along with South Korea, had the highest rate of viewership for the Games – 94 percent of the total population watched some portion of the Olympics. Ratings in the U.S. were an impressive 69 percent. But in Taiwan, none of the cable channels even broadcast the Olympic Games – only the opening ceremony was shown. Furthermore, the single sport the Taiwanese seemed passionate about was their national one: baseball.

Baseball alone rallied Taiwanese crowds in similar ways to the Olympic excitement across the Straits. For Chinese Taipei’s first game against the Netherlands, the McDonald’s located on Xinsheng nanlu (across from National Taiwan University) provided patrons with a large screen showing the entire game. The fast food restaurant also gave each spectator (many of whom had eagerly lined up for hours outside before the game began) red thunder clappers and a free hamburger. At the Shinkong Mitsukoshi (新光三越) department store complex near Taipei 101, cheerleaders rallied the crowd. Some fans symbolically ate poached eggs (荷包蛋, hebaodan) – the Chinese word not only sounds like “Holland posting a zero,” but further implies it since an egg is shaped like a zero. The phrase was also a play on the notion that the Chinese Taipei team was going to “bomb” Holland, and indeed it did in a 5-0 victory.

Fans with blue thunder clappers watching the game between Taiwan and the Netherlands on a big screen in the Shinkong Mitsukoshi plaza
The next game was against Japan. I went to the same McDonald’s to watch (this time, no thunder clappers or free hamburgers), and unfortunately, the Chinese Taipei team suffered a crushing 1-6 defeat to the Japanese. Nonetheless, the Taiwanese were confident their team would win in the next day’s game against China. That wasn’t the case, and many were shocked and dejected when China, not known to excel in baseball, upstaged Chinese Taipei 8-7.

Fans watching the game between Taiwan and Japan at McDonald's
Hidden beneath the baseball scores and unfortunate losses, however, was a strange turn of Olympic scheduling: Taiwan’s first three games were all against countries that have a share in the island’s complex history. The Dutch colonized Taiwan in the early seventeenth century until Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) expelled them from the island in 1662. After a Chinese armada defeated Zheng’s grandson, the Qing dynasty annexed Taiwan and placed it under the jurisdiction of Fujian province. Following its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. After fifty years of Japanese colonization, Taiwan experienced a “glorious return” (光復) to China at the conclusion of World War II. However, some argue that when the Guomindang retreated to Taiwan and set up an authoritarian regime, its rule was also a form of colonization.

As Susan Brownell wrote about earlier this year at China Beat, sports have long been a form of communication between Taiwan and the mainland – the competition between the two entities has mainly been good-natured, yet sometimes fraught with tension. I wondered then what went through the minds of the Taiwanese, especially when their team was defeated by both Japan and China. On the one hand, although the Japanese colonized the Taiwanese and treated them as second-rate citizens, many of them still admire and imitate Japanese culture today (for instance, Taiwanese youth prefer to visit Japan over the U.S.). On the other hand, many Taiwanese resent China’s heavy hand, leading frequent mass protests on the streets against President Ma Yingjou for his “friendly” policies toward the mainland. When Ma allowed direct flights between China and Taiwan, the media reported negative stories of mainlander tourists who escaped from their tour group. One television report chastised seven mainlanders who went to Shilin Night Market, ordered one oyster pancake between them, then demanded seven chopsticks (providing a stereotypical example of how mainlanders are cheap).

This week Ma took another dramatic step in improving relations with China as a way of reviving Taiwan’s tepid economy, as well as building the island’s long-term security and fostering peace with the mainland. Starting on December 15, direct, regularly-scheduled passenger flights from Taiwan and China finally commenced (flights have been ongoing since July, but not daily – only tourist-group charters on weekends and holidays). Under the landmark agreements signed last month, the number of passenger flights was increased to a maximum of 108 per week, up from 36. Furthermore, the two sides launched the first direct postal and shipping links across the strait.

After the Guomindang retreated to the island, it gradually limited the flow of mail to the mainland before completely restricting communication in 1954. With the restoration of the “three links” – direct air, shipping, and postal – these connections end the tedious and costly practice of routing passengers, goods, and mail via a neutral port – usually Hong Kong or Macau. This breakthrough under Ma’s leadership occurs at the same time that Taiwanese prosecutors are indicting former President Chen Shui-bian and thirteen others, including his wife, son, and daughter-in-law, on graft charges and money laundering. Chen had been detained since November 12 on suspicion of corruption, but was released without bail on December 13 around 1:00am to prevent immediate commotion and protest. Taiwanese critics assert that the chief judge who released Chen is a closet DPP supporter because of his decision. Meanwhile, Chinese media are mum on the subject for fear of taking sides and facing accusations from the DPP that mainlanders favor the GMD. Nonetheless, Chinese are paying close attention to the trial, devoting large amounts of news coverage in hopes of using it as an example of how government corruption should be dealt with in their own country.

Thus, despite the “three links’” potentially increasing harmony between both sides, suspicions still remain. Likewise, even though observers deemed the Beijing Olympics a major success, no one has noticed that the Taiwanese consumed the Games with much less enthusiasm than mainlanders.

Jennifer Liu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine.

Human Rights and China’s Public Diplomacy

A Controversy over a Beijing Olympic Float for the 2008 Pasadena Rose Parade

By Hongmei Li

While the Tournament of Roses is busy preparing for the Pasadena Rose Parade on Jan. 1, 2009, it is interesting to revisit a controversy over a Beijing Olympic float for the 2008 parade for at least three reasons: (1) the controversy, largely provoked by FLG practitioners and other human rights groups, attracted huge media attention and the Pasadena city government and its human relations commission held several meetings to consider its position; (2) some analogies can be drawn between the controversy and the protests against the overseas leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay; (3) the controversy also indicates the challenges that Beijing faces in general when it attempts to engage the American public in specific and the Western publics in general.

The Pasadena Sister Cities China Subcommittee initiated the idea of a Chinese Olympic float in 2004 as a form of cultural exchange. In 2004, Avery Dennison, a Pasadena-based company that has branches in China, expressed an interest in being a sponsor. There were sporadic meetings between Pasadena and Xicheng, which is a sister city of Pasadena, from 2004 to 2006. However, Xicheng was told by the Beijing City Municipality that it had “no right to enter an Olympic float.”

Sue Zhang, a prominent Chinese American community leader in Los Angeles became interested in the idea of a Chinese rose float and thus contacted officials in Beijing and talked with the mayor in Pasadena. She was connected with Avery Dennison through the Pasadena Sister Cities Committee and thus became an organizer of a Beijing Olympic-themed float. Ten Chinese Americans became sponsors, with each contributing 20,000 dollars and Avery Dennison contributed 200,000 dollars.

The ten Chinese Americans, most belonging to Beijing Association with Sue Zhang as the chair, then become a newly named organization called the Roundtable of Chinese American Associations in Southern California, On April 15, 2007, Sue Zhang announced at a press conference that a Beijing Olympic-themed Rose Float would appear in the 2008 Pasadena Rose Parade. The announcement was greatly applauded by the conference participants, most of whom were overseas Chinese community leaders and participants in Los Angeles. A Chinese cultural consul in Los Angeles stated that “having the float was a one-hundred year dream fulfilled” and it was “a proud achievement of all Chinese throughout the world.” Many participants at the conference claimed that the float symbolized how Chinese Americans had overcome ideological differences for the first time to accomplish a common goal.

At the beginning, the Olympic float was meant to be part of an overseas marketing plan for the Beijing Olympics. However, after the entry was announced officially, various human rights groups protested against it. Key protest groups include the Caltech FLG Club, Reporters Without Borders, the Visual Arts Guild, Amnesty International, the Conscience Foundation, the China Ministries international, the LA Friends of Tibet, Human Rights Watch, Justice for American Victims in China, New York Coalition for Darfur and the Burma human rights groups. FLG practitioners voiced their concerns first at a city council meeting on June 25, 2006 and were key players in the protest.

Human rights activists made a concerted effort in lobbying the city council members of Pasadena and voiced their concerns repeatedly at routine city council meetings. They spoke about their own suffering or suffering of their relatives or friends in China. Issues such as torturing, the imprisonment of FLG practitioners, journalists and Catholic ministers, police corruption and lack of media freedom were constantly voiced during the public comments sessions on the following days: June 25, July 16, July 23, July 30, Oct. 1, Oct. 8, Oct. 15, Oct. 22, Nov. 5, Nov. 19, Dec. 3, Dec. 10 and Dec. 17.

Mayor Bill Boggard was placed at the center of the controversy because of his active role in promoting the float. The Pasadena City government and city officials made various arrangements to have dialogues with human rights activists. The city council requested its human relations commission to draft a report regarding the float. Consequently, the commission held two special hearings: One meeting was devoted to receiving public comment, and one was devoted to formulating the final form of the report and recommendation. The city council had a special meeting on Oct. 29, which marked a shift in protesting strategies for activists. Prior to the meeting, human rights activists mainly pushed for the dropping of the float from the parade. The argued that the Chinese government was sponsoring the float; the float was about celebrating the Chinese government and thus validating its human rights abuses; the inclusion of the float would be embarrassing to Pasadena. Such rhetoric and request were similar to the reactions of human rights activists to the Beijing Olympic in general. Protesters used withered roses to symbolize shame that the Beijing Olympic float brought to the parade. (See image 1)

Human rights activists urging dropping the float, provided by Xiao Rong
Human rights activists also repeatedly linked the Beijing Olympics to the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany. They called the float “the float of shame,” “the propaganda float” and the “float of genocide.” They produced and circulated an image that transformed the float into a tank that featured a lonely person with a rose in hand trying to stop the tank, which resembled a well-known image about the Tiananmen Square Student Movement in 1989, where a lonely person was trying to stop a stream of tanks from advancing. This tank image was constantly circulated over the Internet as a symbol of brutality of the Chinese Communist regime and humanity of protesters. (See Image 2)

Float of Shame
At the same time, Reporters without borders, also set up a billboard at the intersection of Del Mar Avenue and Arroyo Parkway in early December featuring the Olympic five rings as handcuffs, suggesting that the Beijing Olympics represents tortures rather than human connections. Lau faxed this image to city council members and distributed this image. This powerful image was widely used in protests against the overseas leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay. (See Image 3)

Five Rings as Handcuffs
On December 31, more than one hundred protesters gathered around the Orange Grove Boulevard close to the Tournament House. Some were local people and others came from Northern California and other places. They distributed flyers and set up banners exposing human rights abuses in China. Some drivers honked to show support. On January 1, 2008, when the Beijing Olympic float, featuring five mascots with the logo “one world one dream” rolled down through the Orange Grove, some protesters held the handcuff image aiming to shame Beijing in front of the world. Protesters also asked supporters to turn their backs to the Beijing Olympic float, but few spectators complied though. (See Image 4 and Image 5)

Beijing Olympic Float in Pasadena Rose Parade (AP/Reed Saxon)
(AP/Nick Ut)
The controversy was covered extensively by media such as Pasadena Star News, Pasadena Weekly, the LA Times, KPCC, the Associated Press, Voice of America, KTLA Channel 5, KABC Channel 7 and Chinese-language media. Pasadena Weekly also published letters from residents, most condemning China’s human rights records and viewing the US human rights policies toward China as too soft. Kenneth Todd Ruiz from Pasadena Star News and Joe Piasecki from Pasadena Weekly were staunch supporters for human rights activists.

For the float supporters, one of the most important strategy is to keep the float apolitical by delinking the Beijing Olympics in general and the float in specific from human rights issues in China. It must be pointed out that all city council members and officials, and officials from the Tournament of Roses, regardless of whether they supported the float, all expressed sympathy to human rights activists, condemnation of human rights abuses, and support for human rights improvement. The support can be seen in ongoing conversations between the city government of Pasadena and the human rights coalition about a possible pre-parade human rights torch relay and other arrangements. Even though the arrangement failed for various reasons, with each side telling a different story, sincere efforts to accommodate human rights activists indicate that human rights issues were of significant importance to officials in Pasadena.

There were several controversial points regarding the float. The first was whether the float was political, whether the inclusion of the float was a “validation of the government of China and all its activities such as human rights violations,” and whether such violations should be embarrassing to Pasadena. While protesters viewed the float as the right target, supporters argued that “the float is about celebrating the Olympics and it is consistent in the patter of the celebration tradition in the parade.”

The second point that led to disagreement was whether human rights should be a leading concern when the US deals with China. While some viewed as more desirable to have good relationship and share values, but for others, China is about human rights abuses and anything related to China is opportunity to reach out. It was really about engaging China or shaming China. For supporters of the float, the shame strategy was ineffective and they argued for a middle ground that let the float in and simultaneously showed concern to human rights issues. But for protesters, losing face for the Communist Government was an important strategy to get their message out. While supporters generally viewed that people should be patient with the government and that changes were not made overnight, protesters were extremely suspicious of the government and felt that some Chinese organizations were front organizations of the government.

The third point of disagreement was whether Pasadena had the jurisdiction and moral authority to address human rights issues in China. For many, it was the federal government that should address China’s human rights abuses and the role of local government is to take care of local issues, but for protesters and their supporters, Pasadena should express its stand in China’s human rights abuses. The Beijing Olympic float is complicated because it is a local float with international meanings. Pasadena was especially reluctant to address this issue for being afraid of opening up possibilities for other human rights groups to request Pasadena to deal with similar issues. Because many overseas Chinese were proud of the Beijing Olympics, Pasadena did not want to offend the large Chinese community in Los Angeles.

Understandably, float supporters expressed displeasure of the float being hijacked and they questioned why they did not pick up the Huntington Library where there is a Chinese Garden, or GE or even Wal-Mart that has large businesses in China. Protesters focused on the float because of the tremendous publicity the tournament of roses brings. The 119-year-old yearly parade is one of the most viewed events in the US. The 2008 parade was broadcast live by nine networks/stations and amounted to 14.7 U.S. national Nielsen rating points, or approximately 15.96 million households, with a total audience of approximately 40 million in the U.S. In addition, the Rose Parade was televised in 215 international territories.

The controversy also indicates that relatively small number of committed activists can be very powerful in setting the agenda and influencing international issues. While during the Olympic torch relay, Tibetans and their supporters were most active in posting Beijing, but FLG practitioners were active protesters against the Olympic float. Generally speaking, China’s dim international images, particularly the perception of China’s human rights records, can pose tremendous challenges for China when it engages with the international community. In my conversation with float supporters at the Pasadena city government and the China Sister Cities Committee about whether they would have done things differently if they had known the controversy, all of them expressed a hesitation and stated that they would think twice before any involvement.

One idea about human rights activists seeking overseas support. On the one hand, seeking overseas support can publicize their causes and give the Chinese regime more international pressure, but on the other hand, it gives the Chinese government more legitimacy to crack them down and it might further alienate many Chinese who do not necessarily support the Chinese government and nevertheless are concerned with China’s international images. Indeed, the overwhelming support for the overseas leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay in April-May 2008 indicates that Chinese nationals or overseas Chinese can rally around the government when an idealized image of China is threatened. To a large extent, many Chinese nationals and overseas Chinese are still very sensitive to the issue of national dignity, largely because the national narrative of China’s one-hundred-year humiliation (bainian quru shi) is still resonant with many Chinese. Thus, the backing from any foreign government can backfire by provoking the image of foreign colonizers suppressing the Chinese people again.

Five Stylish Recent Books

As New Year’s is often a time of glitz and glamour (and last-minute holiday giving), we thought we would feature a few books that often include text with smart things to say, but would also be worth getting just for the pictures.


1. Lynn Pan's Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars
An examination of the polyglot artistic influences in early twentieth century Shanghai, by one of the city’s acute observers.





2. Claire Roberts and Geremie R. Barme eds., The Great Wall of China
This book features essays by many scholars about the varied history and uses of the Great Wall, alongside photographs and interviews with people who live with the Wall on a daily basis.




3. Marcia Reed and Paola Dematte eds., China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century
We have mentioned this book before at China Beat—created to accompany an exhibit of works at the Getty Museum, this volume canvases artistic works that depict the interactions between East and West during a vital period of exchange.



4. Antonia Finanne, Changing Clothes in China
Reviewed by Nicole Barnes at China Beat earlier this year, Finnane’s book is a stylish tour through Chinese fashion. Focused particularly on the modern period, Changing Clothes explores the interplay of fashion, social movements, and politics.



5. Melissa Chiu, Art and China's Revolution
Like China on Paper, this book was based on an art exhibit (that we have mentioned at China Beat before), and includes essays by various contributors like Roderick MacFarquhar as well as interviews with artists. The book argues that we must see Cultural Revolution era art as more than just propaganda, but instead an artistic movement that has shaped the contemporary Chinese art world.