Readings for International Women's Day

In honor of International Women’s Day, China Beat posts two reading lists, one of contemporary (recent and by no means exhaustive) visions of Chinese women and another of historical visions of Chinese women.

Contemporary:

1) Xinhua reports on the increasing services for victims of domestic violence in China, following new regulations on police response to domestic violence calls implemented today:

Yu Xiuli, a victim of domestic violence, can turn to police for help if her husband continues to beat her thanks to a regulation which came into effect on Sunday.

The 40-year-old woman in eastern Shandong Province has been bearing the cursing and beating of her husband for years, but has never thought of asking police for help.

"I believed it was not the business of police to stop domestic violence so I has never thought of alerting police," said Yu.

But from Sunday women like Yu could alert police if they fall victim to domestic violence according to a regulation of the province that came into effect Sunday.

Many provinces in China have set up police centers to handle household violence after a national regulation that was issued in September last year requiring police to be dispatched whenever they receive a 110 emergency call regarding household violence.

2) That controversial symbol of femininity, the Barbie Doll, has acquired a new residence in Shanghai, the House of Barbie, where shoppers can not only purchase Barbie merchandise but also sip Barbie cocktails (at NPR, by Louisa Lim):

The lure of the China market was one reason that Mattel chose Shanghai for its first House of Barbie. It's aggressively pursuing developing markets, such as Eastern Europe, Russia and India, which aren't already Barbie-saturated. But when deciding where to place the House of Barbie, Shanghai beat other contenders — including London, Paris, Milan, New York and Los Angeles — because of its strong cross-generation reaction to the doll and the brand.

"There was an amazing connection to Barbie's values," Dickson said. "Barbie in this culture represented a world of possibilities for girls and for women. She's had amazing careers, she has the cars, she has the plane, she has the boyfriend — and she looks fantastic doing it."

Tibetan barbies have also taken up posts at the Lhasa airport, reports Shanghaiist: “The plastic princesses are part of a line of special edition ‘ethnic’ dolls meant to represent the minority groups of China.”

3) As part of a month-long look at women in China, China Crossroads includes the translation of an interview with Professor Zhao Jun on the plight of China’s Xiaojies (hat tip Shanghaiist):

12年从警经历，中国人民大学社会学博士后、潘绥铭弟子的身份，让赵军选定了“女性性工作者被害问题”作为研究课题。Having 12 years experience as a policeman, the People’s University sociology postdoctoral, Zhao Jun selected “the murder of female sex workers” as his subject for study.

尽管“小姐被杀”的新闻频频出现，但在中国，目前鲜有学者关注这一领域。即使在公安机关，也未专门设立这一类别的案例分析系统。Although the murder of female sex workers (in Chinese, xiaojie is the euphemism for female sex workers) appears in the news frequently, little concern has been given to this problem at present. Even in the public security organs, they do not have a special case category involving female sex workers.

近10年来，赵军是以“入圈式”调查方法来收集案例的。在餐厅、在洗脚屋、在KTV，以及在足球场里，这位38岁的学者以“朋友聊天式的非正规访谈”找到了知情者。于是，那些内幕以及现象背后的社会逻辑，就在觥筹交错和足球的起落中浮出水面。During the past 10 years, Zhao Jun engaged himself in collecting related cases. The 38-year-old scholar was able to find insiders by chitchatting with the workers in a friendly way either in restaurants, foot massage parlors, KTV or football fields. Thus, he gained first hand knowledge about a social issue that has been ignored for a long time.

赵军选择的调查样本，主要来源于一个中等规模的地级市和一个发展开发程度较高的沿海城市，结论则是“‘小姐’被害案共性大于个性”。“‘小姐’群体的权利在事实上已被严重边缘化，虽然她们的合法权利在形式上也应得到法律的保护。”赵军说。Zhao Jun’s selected case samples are mainly from medium-sized cities and coastal cities with a relatively higher degree of development. The conclusion of his study is that the murder of xiaojies is a problem threatening the whole group rather than a single problem among a few individuals.” In fact, Xiaojies’ rights have been severely marginalized and their legal rights should also be protected.” Zhao said.

4) Sexy Beijing on Valentine's Day celebrations in China:



5) With all the attention to Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls, this review reminded us of the first major scholarly work on women workers in the Chinese "miracle," an award-winning book by C.K. Lee (who has just relocated to UCLA), Gender and the South China Miracle (1998):

Ching Kwan Lee makes a major theoretical and methodological contribution in her ethnographic study of two shop floors in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. This study highlights both the differences and the similarities between the worlds of labor and challenges theories of labor process, state, feminism and gender and work.

The author shows two worlds of factory women. Localism and familialism are invoked by both workers and mangers to interpret events and social relations in the factory. “Localistic despotism” and “familial hegemony”, respectively, characterize the conditions of dependence of migrant daughters in Shenzhen and veteran working mothers in Hong Kong. In these two factories, localism and familialism generate consent, but also provide opportunities for tactics and resistance. This study shows how management and women workers cooperate and contest, how gender and class relations intermesh in social and cultural processes on the shop floors, and how a politics of identity is constitutive of and constituted by production politics.

Lee argues very convincingly that management's interests, like those of workers, cannot be assumed, but are constituted in specific conditions. Gender is not just inscribed in the organizational hierarchy, but is an integral part of the power process and is also found in accepted notions about who women workers are and what they need. Gender is a cultural construction and is a recurrent reference by which labor-management relations are conceived, legitimized and criticized. They have material roots in shop-floor organization and are shaped by a set of social institutions outside the shop-floors in the labor market, the family, kin networks and even the state.

Historical visions

1) A collection of Agnes Smedley photos, including this one:



2) The online full text article by Harriet Evans on the terms for women's
liberation:

Critiques of the Party's failure to live up to its promise to women have largely started out from socio-economic and political analyses of empirical data-for example, of discriminatory employment and remuneration practices, unequal access to education at different levels of the educational system, unequal representation in political bodies, and gender discrimination in the formulation and implementation of population control policy. Many of these analyses have also drawn attention to the inadequacies of Marxist theories of women's emancipation. Recent analyses of dominant discourses of sexuality in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have broadened the debate to argue that a hierarchical biological essentialism has been a persistent constraint on the conceptualisation and implementation of gender policies since 1949. This paper adopts another approach through focusing on the term and concept of 'liberation' [jiefang] as a central component of the Communist Party's discourse on women. On the basis of analysis of CCP and related documents produced between the early 1920s and 1950s, I argue that the texts written about and often for women produced fixed and hierarchically arranged meanings of jiefang, which consistently denied identification of women as agents of gender transformation, and which insisted on the absolute privileging of class over gender in analyses of gender inequalities. The effect of this was not only to subordinate the 'women's movement' to the goals of social and national revolution as a whole. It established the only language in which gender issues could be publicly discussed. funü jiefang thus became a discursive and ideological tool of Communist Party authority, always and necessarily indicative of pre-ordained approaches to women as social agents. The word produced and reinforced many of the hierarchies that its integration into the rhetoric of revolution ostensibly sought to challenge.

3) A review in English of a Japanese book about nushu (women's writing, which is central to Lisa See's popular novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan):

This volume by Endo Orie is a welcome addition to the growing body of works in the extraordinary script known as Women's Script or nüshu which is used by peasant women in remote villages in Jiangyong county, Hunan province in China. Women's script, as it is known to its practitioners, is a phonetic script quite distinct from Chinese character script. It comprises about seven hundred graphs representing the sounds of Jiangyong dialect (also known as Xiangnan tuhua). Women's script came to international attention only in the early 1990s, after its (re) discovery by Chinese ethnographers in the 1980s. Very few practitioners remain. Endo expresses deep concern that Women's Script will vanish from active use before the phenomenon has been thoroughly investigated…

Endo is not a sinologist and is apparently unaware of western scholarship such as the substantial studies by anthropologists William Chiang and Cathy Silber. Her book is written in a clear and accessible style for the general public in Japan, where it deserves a wide readership, not least for its poignant renditions of Women's Script material exposing the suffering of Jiangyong women under Japanese occupation. But Chūgoku no onnamoji has much to interest anyone with an interest in women's oral and material culture and is of relevance to those interested women's studies generally, linguistics, Chinese history and anthropology.

4) A review of Some of Us (a book of memoirs of growing up female under Mao that counters the Wild Swans version) at Frog in a Well:

I recently came across a book called Some of Us, recommended to me by one of the contributing authors, Dr. Jiang Jin. The book is a collection of memoirs and stories put together by 9 women who lived through China’s Cultural Revolution and subsequently got their Ph.D.s and now are teaching (or in Jiang Jin’s case, was teaching) in the states. What brought them together was a discussion among 3 of them about such Memoirs as Wild Swans and Red Azalea, and the subsequent discovery that these memoirs do not accurately represent their feelings and experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, what these memoirs had done was create a specific image of Maoist era people in the West, almost an Orientalizing process, if you will. Everyone was either a victim or a victimizer, and everyone’s families had either been killed, torn apart, or driven to insanity during the Cultural Revolution.

5) A review of Charlotte Furth’s important study, A Flourshing Yin:

A Flourishing Yin opens a new and important chapter in the history of medicine and gender in China between the Song and the Ming dynasties. Charlotte Furth's account traces the shifts in medical and gender discourses from the 'androgynous' medical narratives and the yin-yang harmony of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the late imperial literature on health and medicine circulating among medical practitioners and the literary public. Based on analysis of medical texts, popular handbooks, recorded teachings of doctors and case histories, it gives particular attention to the development of fuke (medicine for women) as learned discourse between the Song and the Ming. It shows how the changing language of the body between social and medical discourses appears as a rich source for reflecting on the cultural construction of gender. In doing this, it also gives a sophisticated critique of the 'orientalising' view of a single holistic body informing the principles of Chinese medicine.

Self-Promotion Saturday: Conferencing in Shanghai

China Beatniks Jeff Wasserstrom and James Farrer and friend of the blog Andrew Field will be presenting this week at a March 12-14 conference at NYU in Shanghai (on the ECNU campus), called "Urban Representations." The conference is sponsored by NYU, Northwestern University, Sophia University, and ECNU. Click through for a schedule and paper titles.

Free Book up for Grabs

China Beat's First (and Maybe Last) Quiz with a Prize for the Winner

Jeff Wasserstrom recently mentioned in an interview with City Weekend magazine that he's hoping someone at the audience for his March 15 PRC book launch of Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 will ask him this question: “If you could bring back to life, for a day, two people you've written about who are now dead, and ask them questions about what Shanghai was like then, who would they be and what would you ask them?” Well, he wouldn't tell the magazine who he was thinking of, but he's now told us and offered to let us give us a copy of his 2007 book, China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, to the winner of an online contest related to this mystery. Here's how it works:

See if you can figure out from the following clues the identities of the two people he had in mind, one of whom gets a lot of attention in China's Brave New World, the other of whom gets quoted at some length in Global Shanghai.  Please send your answers as well as the supplementary material described below to Kate Merkel-Hess, the Editor of China Beat, at thechinabeat@gmail.com:

THE CLUES:

1) Both people were cosmopolitan women who spent time in both China and the United States.

2) Though only one was an American, each went to college in the U.S., attending in each case schools that had "W"s at the start of one part of the institution's name.

3) One had a husband who studied in Hong Kong and then was later detained in London, while the other had a husband who was imprisoned in Hong Kong and then later taught in London.

4) One was played on screen by Maggie Cheung.

5) One had a husband whose name began with the letters "Cha," while the other had a father whose name began with those same letters,*

*There are important ties between the two women, especially a connection established by a book, but these clues focus on other things, including the men in their lives, since mentioning that publication would give the game away too easily.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

To make this as fair as possible (so that it doesn't privilege people living in particularly time zones), we'd like some additional information to use to break a tie if multiple correct answers to the main question come in within the same 24 hour period.  So please answer the following questions (keeping in mind that we'll be judging these on cleverness):

1) What's a question that it would be particularly interesting to have these two people discuss (if they were brought back to life)?

2) Can you think of a pair of people you think would be more interesting to quiz about Shanghai's past than the two Jeff had in mind?

3) Which actress should play the member of the pair Jeff is thinking of who, as far as we know, has not yet had a movie made of her life (but probably should have one made of it someday)?

[We'll probably publish these comments on the blog when we announce the winner.]

Year of the Gorilla

This is a selection from Jonathan Tel's forthcoming collection of short stories, The Beijing of Possibilities, to be published this summer by Other Press. Tel is the author of Freud's Alphabet and the story collection Arafat's Elephant. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Granta. Drawn to "writing fiction set in places whose inhabitants believe themselves to be at the center of the world," Tel first visted China in 1988 and has particular affinity for Beijing. 

By Jonathan Tel

It's been a while since the Monkey King set out on his Journey to the West. With his Fiery-Gazing Golden-Eyes he infallibly recognized Evil, and vowed to combat it in every form. He changed shape at will and leaped from cloud to cloud. It was in the spring of 2008 that the Gorillagram appeared in mainland China. (One of those fads, we believe, that sneaked in from America or Europe.) A Taiwanese-owned company introduced the concept; they were in the business of couriering documents around Beijing, and they diversified, or call it a promotional gimmick. The way it works is that a man in a gorilla suit arrives in your building. He steps out of the elevator and jogs right up to the reception desk, banging his chest. He's directed to the appropriate cubicle, where he sings, 'Happy Birthday to You!' to the lucky and amazed recipient, or 'Congratulations on your Promotion! Ten thousand Congratulations!' He accepts his tip, and off he goes.

So who is he, this fellow in the furry disguise? His true name is unknown; no doubt he's a migrant worker, not legally resident in the capital. The salary is pitiful, and the costume hot and itchy; he must be from the South. He's not as tall as he looks: his real eyes are at the level of the Gorilla's snout, and he speaks through a veil around its throat. Six days a week, he cycles around Beijing, going wherever he's told; sometimes he's in a hell of a rush, pedaling like crazy, scarcely time to pant his song before he dashes to the next appointment; but there's downtime too - he un-Velcros his head and puffs a cigarette. There are worse ways to make a living.

Now one afternoon in June he'd just finished a job singing the Retirement Song at a graphic design company on Qianmen Dajie, and he was about to mount his Forever bicycle which he'd parked in a nearby alley - not really a rough area, though you have to watch out for pickpockets. A businesswoman walked by, a red handbag swinging from her shoulder. Suddenly he heard a roar and a Honda moped was accelerating past, two men on it. The passenger grabbed the handbag! The businesswoman screamed; she clung to her strap. For what can't have been more than a few seconds the man and the woman struggled. She would not let go. Then the Honda sped down to the end of the alley and made a sharp left. The Gorilla was shocked - he'd heard about such things, he'd been warned by his boss to be careful, and whenever he left his bicycle he always locked it to a railing - but he'd never witnessed such a blatant attempt. So the big city is as dangerous as they say.

While he was thinking these thoughts, the familiar and ominous roar recurred. Once again the thieves were in the alley! They'd circled around, and were swooping in for another go! This time both crooks reached out to seize the prize; the driver kept one hand on his machine while with the other he pawed the woman's strap, and his accomplice punched her on the breasts. As for the Gorilla - a timid man, normally - he couldn't bear to see a woman treated like this. He let go of his Forever and bounded along the alley, beating his fists against the front of his costume and uttering a deep 'Hoo-hoo!' The thieves had already taken possession of the handbag and were about to drive off. The Gorilla pounced. With one hairy arm he practically choked the driver, with the other he twisted the handlebars, knocking the moped over, while his knee connected with the groin of the whimpering accomplice. He dusted off the handbag and returned it to the businesswoman. The thieves fled. The Gorilla made a little bow.

He returned to his bicycle and headed off to his next job.

*

That might have been the end of the matter, but it so happened that a student in a nearby teashop had heard the noise and stepped outside. He took photographs of the incident with his cell phone. He posted an account on his blog.

The blog was linked to other blogs - and soon the pictures, along with cut-and-pastings of the text and retellings of the story, appeared on several online forums. There was much speculation as to who the Gorilla might have been, along with approval of his actions, as well as more wide-ranging discussion of the growing problem of urban street crime. (Who is to blame? What should we do about it?) The story was picked up by a newspaper in Hebei Province, and from there it was copied by a news agency and printed in further papers and magazines. BRAVE GORILLA RESCUES CITIZEN - IN HER PLIGHT, AN "ANIMAL" HELPS HER - SUPERMONKEY TO THE RESCUE! Given that there was only one Gorillagram company in Beijing, it wasn't difficult for the media to locate the Gorilla. But the management turned down all requests for interviews on his behalf. It would draw attention away from their core business; the last thing they wanted was for the public to think they were in the business of crime-fighting, not to speak of the potential liability suit. They handed the Gorilla his fan mail - letters and postcards from all across the nation, including a proposal of marriage from a young lady in Shaanxi Province, addressed simply to Hero Gorilla, Beijing - and told him sternly to stick to his job in future. From the Gorilla's point of view, he was more embarrassed than anything; all he'd done was what you or I might under the circumstances. And it made his work harder. When he went into an office to do his act, likely as not the middle managers would want to chat and the secretaries would flirt, and he didn't get bigger tips either - on the contrary, people seemed to assume now he was a celebrity he didn't need the money. 'Excuse me,' he'd mumble in his Southern accent, 'it was over in a second, I don't remember much.' And if they still kept pestering him he'd deny his involvement: 'I guess you must be thinking of some other ape.'

Meanwhile the online discussion continued. The majority of netizens were supportive of his actions ('We need monkeys like that in Guangdong …' and 'The government ought to award the Gorilla a medal …' were typical responses; a woman who called herself Tingting23 said she'd been born in the Year of the Monkey herself and 'Monkeys are famous for their helpfulness and quick thinking'), but others were skeptical: 'How do we know the Gorilla was in fact a hero? All we can tell from the pictures is that two men were taking a woman's handbag and the Gorilla intervened. Maybe she wanted the men to have her bag?' The story was alluded to on a discussion board: 'It is a shame that stick-in-the-muds are opposing a market economy with Chinese characteristics. The last thing we need is to have a Gorilla barge in every time we shake hands on a deal!' Which led to further criticism, as well as some support of the Gorilla for 'preserving Maoist values'. An editorial in the July issue of the Bejing Financial Review referred somewhat obscurely to 'Gorillas and their ilk who shoot sparrows with a pearl' in the context of defending the opening up of the mining industry to foreign investment.

*

That summer, in advance of the Olympics, teams of police were going around the city checking IDs, arresting or deporting illegals. Those who made their living on the streets were especially in danger of being caught, and many jugglers and conjurors and balloon-folders were never seen again. The Gorilla felt fairly secure: with a get-up so striking, he didn't look like he had anything to hide. But one afternoon when he came back to the courier company, a police officer was waiting for him. 'We've had reports,' the officer said. The Gorilla said, 'What did I do?' The officer fastened handcuffs around his thick hairy wrists, and drove him to the station.

Now it seemed that every officer in Beijing was gathered around, eager to ogle the celebrity; the police were pointing and chattering among themselves like children at the zoo. They yelled questions at him. 'Where's your ID? Where's your temporary residence permit? Where's your employment permit?' The Gorilla shook his head. A middle-ranking officer scolded him, 'You're the worst kind. What we call a Three-No.'

There followed the business of taking fingerprints; it wasn't possible to bare his hand without taking off his entire costume, and in the end an officer just pressed the Gorilla's furry fingers on the ink pad. Next he was photographed, face-on and in profile, for the record. He asked, 'Do you want me to remove my head?' But he was pictured just as he was - nobody wanted to see the face of an ordinary human migrant worker; let's not break the spell.

'I didn't know I was doing anything bad,' the Gorilla pleaded. 'All I did was go around offices singing songs. I'll sing for you, if you like.'

That was the wrong thing to have said. One officer responded, 'What does he think this is? Karaoke night?' Another went, 'Sing? You think we can't sing for ourselves, better than any monkey?' A third declared, 'Are you attempting to bribe a police officer in the course of his duties?' while making the 'shame on you' gesture with index finger against cheek. And meanwhile the first officer was repeating his witticism, laughing at the punchline - 'Karaoke night!' - louder every time.

A senior officer, Detective Wang, held out his hands for silence. He took charge of the interrogation. 'Listen. Gorilla, Mister Monkey, whoever you are. According to our records, you were involved in the theft of a handbag.'

'The handbag wasn't actually stolen. What happened was -'

'Aha! You're admitting it was a case of attempted theft!'

The Gorilla tried to explain, but his Mandarin was far from fluent, and it was difficult to raise his voice above the background noise. An older officer was warbling 'My Motherland' in a resonant tenor - 'When friends visit we treat them well; when enemies visit we are ready for them with a hunting musket …' - and a younger officer was marveling, 'We've never had a monkey in here before.' Detective Wang glared at the audience, 'Shush! I'm trying to conduct an interrogation here!'

The Gorilla mumbled his excuses.

Detective Wang wiped his brow with the back of his hand. This was really too much. He couldn't be expected to arrest every beggar, busker, and queerly costumed oddball in the city. He scrolled down the Gorilla's file - pages of barely relevant stuff trawled up by a search engine. 'So, Gorilla, is it true that you're opposed to the development of capitalist enterprise in China?'

'Yes. I mean, no. Er, what is the correct answer?'

The station had never been so crowded. Still more police were coming in to gawk, and civilian employees too. One officer had texted his girlfriend, who'd come running over in high heels from the fashion boutique where she was employed; another officer had brought his aged mother, who jabbed her fingers in the Gorilla's direction and stifled her laughter with a hand over her toothless mouth.

Wang turned to an underling, Detective Zhao. 'Oh, get him to confess something, then we'll get rid of him.'

Wang sat down at a desk with his back to the fray, and busied himself with paperwork. Meanwhile Zhao typed the confession on the Gorilla's behalf. 'Actions liable to cause public disorder … Obstruction of the highway … Failure to show Identity Document when requested…'

'I don't know how to read all these fancy words,' the Gorilla said. 'And besides, I'm innocent.'

'Yes, yes,' said Zhao, and pressed the Gorilla's thumbprint on the dotted line.

The Gorilla was in the midst of the mob. Some wit kept offering him a banana, another taunted him, 'Where's your demon-exposing mirror, Monkey King?' and people climbed on chairs and on the radiator, the better to peek and jabber at the suspect, and all the while he slumped there, surrounded by his enemies and admirers, saying nothing at all.

Then somebody made a dunce's cap out of cardboard and put it on the Gorilla's head, and a placard was strung around his neck, 'I Opposed The Will Of The People', and he was made to stand with arms twisted back in 'airplane position' for a full hour, his secret eyes weeping behind the simian snout, while the police drank tea and had their photos taken with the captive beast.

Eventually, 'You can go now,' Detective Wang said. And a young officer patted his fur and murmured, 'Soft.'

*

The Gorilla went back to the courier company. He did some more jobs for them, cycling to offices and singing congratulations, but his heart wasn't in it. A couple of weeks later, soon after the closing ceremony for the Olympics, he failed to arrive at work. The gorilla suit remained empty, sagging on the hook. The company considered hiring a replacement, but the fad had had its day, and really it was more trouble than it was worth. As for the man who had acted the part, we can only guess his fate. Is he still in Beijing, in a different guise, working in some other line? Or did he return to the village he grew up in? At any rate the Hero Gorilla has never been seen again.

China to Me

We've added a new blog to our daily reading--Evan Osnos's dispatches at The New Yorker. Currently blogging from Vietnam, Osnos posted a few thoughts on Friday about Vietnam's lengthy relationship with China ("Long After We Left") and a few days earlier the delightfully-titled "From Karenina to Cyrus," which in one short vignette traces the intellectual influences from West to East over the past few generations.

In his first post to the blog, Osnos mentioned a favorite China watcher here at China Beat, Emily Hahn. Osnos writes, "I like to imagine what she would have made of this blog. Upon arriving in China in 1935, she penned a letter to her family, which began, 'The thing that daunts me about writing letters is the effort involved in getting them mailed. The prices of stamps changes every few hours and there are never any mailboxes anyway.'"

Last year, we kicked off a (very) occasional feature called "Our Women in China" which draws attention to the outstanding female raconteurs of China, and we've been meaning to do a post on Emily Hahn ever since. In lieu of a reflection on her importance to China studies and China watching (we promise to come back to it sometime in the future), here is a short list to whet your appetite:

1. A list of her many publications can be found here.

2. Far East Economic Review remembers Hahn's understated indictment of red light district reforms in Hong Kong.

3. The Writer's Almanac writes about Hahn on the anniversary of her birthday this year (January 14).

4. The New York Times' obituary (February 19, 1997).

5. Jeff Wasserstrom draws connections between Missouri and China, of which Hahn is one.

Chatting with Wen

One of the topics we raised in China in 2008 was the changing relationship between the Chinese leadership and regular people over the past years. Last week China Digital Times pointed to another example of this changing relationship--Wen Jiabao answering netizens' questions online.

We've run a few related pieces at the site before, such as Nicolai Volland's "Boss Hu and the Press" and Richard Kraus's "Preserving the Premier's Calligraphy at Beichuan Middle School."

Wolf Totem revisited (yet again)

I know that this site has run more than its fair share of commentaries on Wolf Totem already, including both a negative review and a piece defending the novel. I've even done one piece about it already myself, which took the form of a wrap-up look at the widely varied responses it generated in different quarters. It might seem that enough is enough, but I can't resist slipping in one more short post, due to a new award that this work is up for that some people who thought it shouldn't have gotten earlier prizes might be rooting for it to win: the 2009 Delete Key Award for Bad Writing.

I learned about this nomination from a comment that Janice Harayda--the one-time book editor for the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer who now runs the entertaining and informative site, "One-Minute Book Reviews," that's sponsoring the prize in question--posted recently at China Beat. (This just goes to show that many of us at the blog do pay attention to those comments, even if we aren't always quick on the keyboard in terms of responding to those about our own pieces--I know I can be slow to do this.) Harayda offers a wonderfully concise rationale for Wolf Totem's inclusion on her short list, and also offers up for this book (as for many others) a "Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide" to it. Definitely worth checking both of these out, but a word of warning: the site, which I've just discovered, seems like the type that offers the sort of serious fun for the intellectually curious that could easily become addictive.

p.s. I find it particularly appropriate to use a posting about Wolf Totem to draw attention to a site many of our readers might not know about (after all, it only very occasionally focuses on any sort of Chinese theme), since Jiang Rong's novel was the focus back when the New York Times' "Paper Cuts: A Blog about Books" ran its first piece telling readers about China Beat (a site that runs many posts that aren't about books). So, there's a nice working of Karma here, which, whatever else one has to say about Wolf Totem, is definitely a point in its favor.

p.p.s. I was going to vow that I would never again mention the book on this site, but I might not be able to resist the temptation of doing so, if only to update our readers on whether it "wins" this latest prize.

Commentators on Clinton on China

Following Hillary Clinton’s visit to Asia, there have been a range of commentaries on her new approach to China. Clinton’s downplay of that standard gambit of Sino-American relations, human rights, has pleased some commentators and maddened others. Here’s a selection of five ways of looking at her China visit:

1) A Missed Opportunity, Merle Goldman at the Boston Globe:

The Charter 08 episode in China reveals widespread dissatisfaction with China's authoritarian market economy, including those who are the supposed beneficiaries of China's political model. Their participation in the Charter 08 movement may be attributed not only to worsening economic conditions in late 2008 because of the increasing closure of China's export industries due to slackening demand for Chinese consumer goods in the West, but also questioning of the political system on which the Chinese Communist Party has based its legitimacy. Despite the crackdown, Charter 08 represents a multi-class movement for political change in China that is likely to continue.

Such a movement needs the support of the international community. The worldwide outcry over the crackdown on the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslavakia marked the beginning of the unraveling of the Communist system in Eastern Europe. Clinton's recent visit to China would have been the appropriate venue for criticism of China's suppression of Charter 08.

Demands for political change in China will continue. The Obama administration should give more attention to human rights issues in China and support those who advocate peaceful political reforms. Clinton's trip to China was a missed opportunity.

2) A "Relief,"AFP at The Straits Times:

CHINA'S state media on Monday described Hillary Clinton's trip to Beijing as a relief, after the US secretary of state steered clear of human rights to focus on cooperation between the two nations…

She maintained that Washington's concerns about rights in China should not be a distraction from vital trade and environmental issues, pointing to the need for cooperation between the world powers amid the economic crisis.

'If the point of Hillary Rodham Clinton's maiden voyage overseas in her new role as United States secretary of state was to assure and reassure, she made it,' the China Daily said.

3) A Promising Approach to the Region, John C. Bersia of McClatchy-Tribune:

Both showmanship and substance were on display during Clinton's tour. The showmanship was essential to underscore that a different approach is in effect. Toward that end, she – a globally known quantity – has distinct advantages. Many people, from officials to average citizens, want to see her, and she happily accommodates them. But I was even more pleased with the substance, notably what Clinton said during her visit to China.

In fact, her statements went to the heart of the creative engagement that is necessary for the United States to continue to lead in Asia. Although she rightly reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to human rights, she also indicated that the issue will not "interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises." In other words, there will be separate tracks for those matters.

4) The End of a “Charade,” Alex Spillius at The Telegraph:

I found her honesty refreshing. For 20 years Western, particularly British and American, leaders have assured their publics that they would pressurise Beijing on Tibet, political dissidents and freedom of religion. The rhetoric was empty.

Perhaps the apogee of this cravenness was Jiang Zemin's London visit during the Blair era, when protestors were kept from his view by police vans, while the Foreign Office insisted that human rights was heavily on the agenda.

Now Mrs Clinton has admitted that other things matter much, much more to Washington, namely economic survival. She has exposed the myth that we can't afford to be unpleasant to the Chinese.

It will be to her shame if she drops human rights from all her discussions with the Chinese over the next four years. They remain guilty of abuses which should make all of us very uncomfortable dealing with Beijing. She says that won't be the case. Human rights groups, rightly, will be holding her to account.

5) As One Visit Among Many, a wrap-up of Clinton’s recent trips abroad at Worldpress.org

Regarding the Guantanamo Uyghurs

By James Millward

I never thought I’d see “Free the Uighurs” on the editorial pages of major U.S. newspapers, but there it was last Thursday in the Washington Post (Editorial, February 19, 2009, p. A14) and Monday in the Los Angeles Times (Editorial, Feb. 23, 2009). Of course, the editorial was not discussing Uyghurs in China, but the seventeen Uyghur detainees at Guantanamo, whom a federal appeals court ruled could be brought to the U.S. only by an act of the executive branch, not the courts. The Post urged the Obama administration to do the right thing by these men, whom the Bush administration acknowledged years ago were not “enemy combatants” but whom it could neither send back to China nor find a third country willing to take.

It was not that long ago that references to Uyghurs hardly ever appeared in the international press. From the late 1980s through the late 1990s there were occasional stories, when reporters given rare opportunities to travel to Xinjiang sought out silk road exotica and separatism—story lines they seem to have settled on before their trip. It was not hard to flesh out the template with colorful minority clothing, mutton kabobs and some young guy in the bazaar complaining about the Chinese. The rare actual violent incidents were exciting—they fit the imagined narrative that Xinjiang was a “simmering cauldron” or “powder-keg waiting to blow.” But they were harder to write about, as information was scant and mainly filtered through PRC state media, which was then intent on minimizing any local unrest or dissent. Internally, in the late 1990s Xinjiang Party officials still worried about the Xinjiang issue becoming “internationalized”—in other words, emerging, like Tibet, as a global cause célèbre.

After September 11th, 2001, China abruptly reversed course, deliberately publicizing the issue of Uyghur dissent as “terrorism, separatism and religious extremism,” and explicitly linking potential unrest in Xinjiang (the region was in fact quiet from 1997 through 2008) to Al Qaeda and the U.S. “global war on terror.” This linkage was accomplished through a document issued in English by the State Council in January 2002, official press reports, and print and broadcast interviews with Chinese leaders. The message was much reiterated in subsequent years; state media and PRC leaders proclaimed Uyghurs to be the main potential security risk to the 2008 Olympics (in the spring before and during the Olympics, there were in fact three incidents of what seems to have been politically-inspired violence involving Uyghurs in Xinjiang.)

The U.S. government, international media and anti-terrorism think-tanks contributed to the re-branding of Uyghur dissent as a “movement” motivated by Islamist thinking and linked to “international terror organizations.” Stereotyped notions about Islam and a paucity of solid firsthand information about Xinjiang made plausible the idea that Al Qaeda-type Uyghur jihadis were “waging” a “militant” “resistance” against Chinese authorities, even in absence of anything like a terrorist attack for over a decade. Because every “movement” needs an acronym, concerns crystallized around ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement), one of several groups mentioned in the Chinese State Council document. The U.S. listed ETIM as an international terrorist organization in 2002 and mistakenly attributed to it all the violent acts reported by the PRC as having occurred in Xinjiang for the ten years prior to 1997, though Chinese sources themselves up to that point had not attributed any specific acts to ETIM (they did so subsequently). The U.S. thus made ETIM the name to conjure with.[1]

Now the “Uyghur issue” is well and truly internationalized, thanks to U.S. and Chinese policies and rhetoric over the past several years. Indeed, at the moment it stands at the crux of U.S.-Chinese relations. In order to close down Guantanamo prison, as President Obama has pledged, detainees who cannot be repatriated must be resettled elsewhere. In order to convince third countries to accept Guantanamo detainees, the U.S. must first show willingness to resettle some itself. Politically, the Uyghurs are the easiest choice among the detainees for U.S. asylum: they were determined by the Bush administration to harbor “no animus” towards the United States; there is a measure of Congressional support for their resettlement thanks in part to effective lobbying efforts by the Uyghur America Association (itself funded by the U.S. government through the National Endowment for Democracy); and the Uyghur community here is eager to help in the detainees’ transition.

Of course, the PRC government strongly opposes resettling Uyghurs from Guantanamo in the U.S. or anywhere else, and wants them sent back to China. As Li Wei, from the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, put it in an interview with NPR’s Anthony Kuhn (Morning Edition, Feb. 20, 2009), “what would the American government think if China sheltered people who threatened America's national security?” Li makes a reasonable point: if China publicly resettled Al Qaeda trainees from Afghan camps, the U.S. would take this as a major affront.

So now, with the Obama-era U.S.-China relationship still unformed, an act critical to realizing the president’s promise to shut down Guantanamo will also, like it or not, be seen as his major first act related to China: granting asylum to a group of men China has repeatedly and publicly denounced as violent terrorist members of ETIM. The Chinese public and most Chinese academics, party-members and officials sincerely believe Uyghur terrorists pose a grave security threat to China. ETIM is their Al Qaeda.

Moreover, despite the fact that no country and no serious scholar disputes the legality of China’s sovereignty in Xinjiang, some Chinese believe the U.S. supports and foments Uyghur terrorism in order to destabilize China. American academics who write about Xinjiang have been (falsely) accused in Chinese publications of working with the U.S. government to provide “a theoretical basis for one day taking action to dismember China and separate Xinjiang” (Pan Zhiping, in his introduction to the internal Chinese translation of Frederick Starr, ed. Xinjiang: China's Muslim Frontier). We should not underestimate the perception gap between the U.S. and China over Xinjiang and the Uyghurs. In China, the issue is as radioactive as the sands of Lop Nor.

Thus, while the U.S. press has discussed the Guantanamo Uyghurs mainly as a domestic U.S. political and legal issue, their fate could have a great impact on U.S.-China relations at this critical time. The legacy of the Bush administration’s China policy is often treated as broadly positive, thanks to the role played by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and resultant stress on economic affairs. However, the Guantanamo Uyghurs are another huge mess Bush got us into. Thanks to Bush-era mistakes and the fuzzy but dangerous notion of “global war on terror,” the Obama administration faces yet another potential crisis—one in U.S.-China relations—right off the bat.

The U.S. should recognize that while resettling the seventeen Uyghurs here may be the only way to break the Guantanamo log-jam, to do so will mean asking China to swallow something extremely unpalatable. If a blow-up in U.S.-China relations can be averted, it will be because American diplomats handle the issue with the extreme sensitivity it merits, and because China chooses to overlook U.S. hypocrisy and place the greater interests of good Sino-U.S. ties over their entrenched rhetorical position on Xinjiang. In so doing they will help us put yet another Bush-era disaster behind us and move on.

James Millward teaches Chinese history at Georgetown University and is the author of, most recently, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (2006).

[1] On the mistakes in the public US statement accompanying the U.S. listing of ETIM, see my "Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: a Critical Assessment," East West Center policy studies #6, Washington D.C.: East West Center, 2004.

James Hevia on Summer Palace Relics

With disputes relating to looted Chinese objects in the news, we asked Professor James Hevia of the University of Chicago, author of an important book called English Lessons, which includes analysis of foreign military actions in China from the 1860s through the post-Boxer occupation of 1900-1901 and was cited in our earlier post on the topic, if he had any thoughts on the subject to share with our readers. Already quoted briefly in a useful Christian Science Monitor article on the issue, here's what he had wrote in response to our query:

The recent announcement by Christie’s of yet another auction including Summer Palace plunder continues the long tradition of corporate and national indifference to the depredations of European armies in Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century. Imperial and colonial warfare always resulted in plunder. This is not news, but does need to be remembered in a form other than the public sale of stolen artifacts. More importantly, no one has yet been able to arrive at a formula for addressing what are obviously understood by the descendents of victims of these events as ongoing forms of humiliation. It does not help the situation to read a Christie’s statement claiming that “for each and every item … there is clear legal title.” That is not simply preposterous, but Orwellian. How can there be clear legal title to looted objects? That bit of mendacity is further compounded by Christie’s claim that they also adhere to international law on cultural property. There was no international law in 1860 dealing with cultural property, which requires, I think, another way of thinking about the status and ownership of the objects in question. The same could be said for the museums like the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, the Guimet in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and numerous military museums and officer’s messes in Europe and North America that hold objects taken in and around Beijing in 1860 and 1900-1901. Insofar as they are capable, the animal heads on sale at Christie’s stand in for this vast amount of plunder. Turning them into commodities only makes matters worse.

There is also a certain irony in all of this. Since 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China, the Yuan Ming Gardens in Beijing was the site of the “Never Forget National Humiliation” memorial wall. There inscribed on numerous plaques was the sordid history of European and American incursions into China, of opium dealing, and the imposition of unequal treaties that made up the “century of humiliation.” For reasons that are unclear, the monument was taken down last year. Perhaps it had something to do with the Olympics. But given this recent reminder of the violent behavior of Westerners in nineteenth century China, I would not be too surprised to see a new monument, one that might be titled “Never ever forget national humiliation.”

In Case You Missed It: Passion of the Mao

By Jeremiah Jenne

Passion of the Mao is the quirky documentary produced by Lee Feigon based on his book Mao: A Reinterpretation. There's some things to like about the film. I appreciated the irreverence, and there were a number of chuckle-worthy jokes and sly references as well as several precipitous descents into banal toilet and body humor. (Some of which, for awhile, are also pretty chuckle-worthy.) Mao's writings are referenced throughout the film, though Mr. Feigon's choice to have them read using a voiceover that recalled the worst of the Fu Manchu films from early Hollywood is odd. Mr. Feigon also gives prominence to Mao's fondness for scatological references and bawdy language. It's funny and raunchy and, for the most part, unnecessary. Mao was the kind of guy who liked young girls, disliked bathing, and enjoyed the occasional fart joke. Okay, I got it. Next.

In terms of history, the first half of the film is quite good. The occasional surrealist cartoon or madcap aside doesn't distract from a pretty solid narrative that hits the high points of Mao's early career, a narrative which is interwoven nicely with the larger story of the Communist Revolution. But like that revolution, the movie starts to veer off course after we get to 1949. Mr. Feigon does well to reminds us that the early years of the 1950s were ones of economic growth and relative peace (though not so much if you were declared a landlord or a rightist). His treatment of elite politics in this era centers on a portrayal of Peng Dehuai as a "Judas" figure whose long-standing grudge against Mao led to an ill-fated showdown at Lushan. It's an intriguing re-telling of the Mao-Peng dynamic, but to cast Peng as having sold out Mao for 30 pieces of Soviet silver in this CCP passion play comes off a bit disingenuous given that there is little (if any) mention of the downfall of Lin Biao.

And it is this decision to minimize events from the latter part of the 1960s and 1970s that is perhaps the film's greatest flaw. For all the antics, animation, and toilet humor, Mr. Feigon has a serious point to make: Perhaps we've misunderstood the Cultural Revolution all along, that it wasn't that bad, and that any evidence to the contrary is the result of the wrong people ending up in power following Mao's death. Mr. Feigon dismisses Red Guard violence as an early setback in the movement, and chooses instead to focus on statistics which suggest increased educational access, economic growth, and industrial output during the 1966-1976 period. He doesn't say where the numbers come from and if he's using CCP figures from that era then obviously we must maintain a certain healthy skepticism.

The hypothesis that the political interests of Deng Xiaoping and his allies in the post-GPCR period have shaped the discussion and discourse about the Cultural Revolution is an intriguing one, and it is a not-so-subtle subtext of the movie that Mr. Feigon views the current government and the legacy of Deng Xiaoping with great disdain. In this way, he reminds me of protesters in China today who hold up pictures of The Chairman as a whip against the current government, one which is seen as more a product of Deng Xiaoping's reformist policies than of Mao's revolutionary vision.

In the end, while I enjoyed the beginning of Mr. Feigon's movie, the casual glossing of the Cultural Revolution was disturbing to me. I have met and talked to too many people who still cannot shake terrible memories of that period. I know families still riven by animosity over events which occurred forty years earlier. I'm willing to accept that the collective and official memory of the Cultural Revolution and Mao was influenced by the political needs of Deng Xiaoping, but in this movie Mr. Feigon himself commits the error of "Leaning too far to one side" and is a bit too blasé about an event which caused great pain and suffering for many people. In the end, it will take more than fart jokes and film parodies to save Mao's legacy.

Around the Web…

In case you are interested in reading more from writers we’ve referenced recently or on topics we’ve been tracking lately, here are a few recommendations from this week.

The New York Times ran a set of commentaries yesterday on “what the Chinese want from Obama,” including commentaries by Michael Meyer and Daniel Bell (links to their previous pieces at China Beat).

Meyer writes about Clinton’s visit to China, and the power she has to shift discussions in China (and the U.S.) about China’s desire for an “American lifestyle”:

Yet as modernizing Chinese cities emulate America’s car-friendly designs — and often employ American architects, but not clean-energy firms to realize it — she could tie China’s urbanization into her broader agenda of engaging Beijing in a partnership to reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency, measures that would affect global health and the economy.

“If Chinese want to live the American way of life, then we need seven earths to support them,” the founder of China’s first environmental nongovernmental organization once told me. That impact is of less concern to a government funding large-scale urbanization in the service of economic growth. Planners and officials here often insist, with rightful indignation, that “we have every right to make the same development mistakes that America did.”

Mrs. Clinton could correct that perception with a visit to the hutong the way her husband galvanized AIDS awareness when he hugged an H.I.V.-positive girl at a Beijing speech in 2003.

Daniel Bell relays what his students think about Obama, emphasizing their resistance to “Obama mania”:

Of course, there is respect for Mr. Obama’s intellectual abilities and leadership skills. But even “liberal” students are given to skepticism. One of my graduate students told me that she was dismayed by the uncritical coverage of the inauguration, the kind of love-fest for a political leader that could only make the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party envious. We discussed, only half-jokingly, the possibility that China should adopt some form of constitutional monarchy, so that the public could project its emotions on a symbolic leader while evaluating the de facto political leader’s performance more rationally.

Of course, this “uncritical coverage” is rather debatable—since there was indeed a great deal of critical coverage of the inauguration and of Obama in the United States, but Bell’s point that the stories of Obama’s popularity in China have been hyped up is well taken.

We have mentioned James Hevia’s work on imperialism in China; he was quoted in a recent piece at The Christian Science Monitor on the Christie’s auction flap.

The "imperial objects are an absent presence in a tale of loss, humiliation, and the recovery of national sovereignty," says James Hevia, a professor at the University of Chicago and expert in European military traditions of plunder.

Last month, we ran a short list from Claire Conceison on Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng, taken from her work on his autobiography, Voices Carry. This week, she did an interview about the book on NPR’s Here and Now. You can listen by making a jump to Here and Now’s website.

Clinton’s visit to China was much in the news lately—a piece from Reuters discusses her indication to Beijing that human rights will not be at the top of the U.S.’s Sino-American agenda:

Making her first trip abroad as secretary of state, Clinton said three of her top priorities in Beijing will be addressing the global economic crisis, climate change and security challenges such as the North Korean nuclear weapons programme.

"Now, that doesn't mean that questions of Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, the whole range of challenges that we often engage on with the Chinese, are not part of the agenda," Clinton told reporters in Seoul before flying to Beijing. "But we pretty much know what they are going to say.

"We have to continue to press them but our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises," she added. "We have to have a dialogue that leads to an understanding and cooperation on each of those."

The environment is at the top of Clinton’s agenda, but it is as yet unclear what U.S.-China collaboration on this issue will look like. At his blog, James Fallows provided links to a new report from the Asia Society and the Pew Center that makes specific proposals for cooperation on energy and climate change.

Last week, we also ran a commentary from Ken Pomeranz about water in China. For an additional viewpoint, those in the New Haven area may be interested in an upcoming talk (on February 25) by Chunmiao Zheng on “Will China Run Out of Water?”