Readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy"

The events that began with the May 4th protests and the struggle that took place seventy years later during the lead-up to the June 4th Massacre loom largest in the history of Chinese youth activism in years ending with the numeral 9. But there were also protests involving university students in other years ending with that number, including 1999. These took place soon after the 80th anniversary of the may 4th Movement was marked, and they were triggered by NATO missiles hitting the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three PRC nationals. The Embassy was hit on May 7 European time, but by then it was already May 8 in China. So, following a time-honored tradition, the term “May 8th Tragedy” was used for the event. Here are links to five accounts of the protests of that year (some by people whose names will be familiar to many readers of China Beat). They remind readers of what happened ten years ago and offer differing interpretations of how the demonstrations of 1999 should be contrasted with and in some cases can be linked to the student-led actions of years such as 1919 and 1989:

1 and 2. Two news accounts from the time (one by James Miles, another to which Rebecca MacKinnon contributed).

3. The closest thing to a blog post at the time (a Salon.com piece by a foreign student who was at Beida).

4 and 5. Two later analyses: one by political scientist Peter Gries, and one by Jeff Wasserstrom, which looks at the 2005 anti-Japanese protests, but includes discussion of earlier demonstrations, including those of 1999.

The Big March of April 27, 1989

Wang Chaohua is an independent scholar who received her doctorate from UCLA last year, has written political commentaries for periodicals such as the New Left Review, and is the editor of One China, Many Paths. A leader of the Tiananmen protests of 1989, she wrote the following essay reflecting on the events of twenty years ago for Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper, which will run the original Chinese language version soon. Dr. Wang has been good enough to provide us with an English language translation to publish here.

We all know that the large scale, student-led pro-democracy movement that took place in China twenty years ago was triggered by the April 15, 1989, death of Hu Yaobang, the former General-secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). After a stalemate between the government and the protesters that lasted for almost two months, the Party eventually gave the order to open fire at the masses, resulting in the June Fourth Massacre that saw many peaceful protesters killed or injured by military forces. To this day, there has not been an independent investigation into the crime, nor any open, reliable counting of the victims. Some facts, though, are clear, such as that the majority of victims were not students but ordinary urban residents of Beijing, the capital city.

However, a careful look at the actual development of events reveals that, in the first ten days or so, the great majority of protesters were students. When Hu Yaobang’s funeral was held on April 22 and the casket was carried from the funeral site, the Great Hall of People by Tiananmen Square, to its final resting place in west suburban Beijing, there were not many people spontaneously lining up the big thoroughfare to pay their final tribute to Hu – at least, far fewer than had turned more than a decade earlier, when there was a massive showing at the funeral of former Premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976. Those mourning crowdssent political shock waves through the capital.

A key early turning point in 1989, when the protest changed from a student movement to a movement of the masses, came on April 27, when a big “illegal” march took place in Beijing. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the People’s Republic. The immediate cause of the march was a notorious editorial, issued by the Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, on April 26. Social discontent had been widespread for some time, due to setbacks of the economic reform (including near-run-away inflation in the summer of 1988) and tightened politico-economic control in early 1989 (including reissued grocery coupons and reduced space for political commentary or proposals at the annual National People’s Congress and National Political Consultative Conference). Deploying formulated expressions from the later stage of the Cultural Revolution of the early-to-mid 1970s and full of implied threats of political suppression, the April 26 editorial provoked immediate and strong reactions among city dwellers. It had been almost a whole decade since the Reform started and general reflections on the Cultural Revolution had gone from redressing wrongs to searching for cultural roots and to appealing for democracy and renewed enlightenment. Why, the people wondered, did the government decide to revert to an “old” sort of rhetoric, just because there had been some student protests?

I still remember vividly the events of those days. On the morning of April 26 we had just announced in our first press conference the establishment of the Beijing Association of College Students (BACS, gao zi lian). That afternoon, the municipal Party Committee held a meeting in the Great Hall of People of ten-thousand Party cadres working in the educational sector, the goal of which was to figure out and mobilize support to implement strategies to control the student unrest. In the evening, our newly elected BACS president was put under great personal pressure in his student dorm and forced to issue a cancellation of the planned march for the next day. The authorities without delay drove him to announce the cancellation on major campuses in the wee hours of April 27. Many campuses saw student internal conflicts in varied degrees, caused by the confusion. Yet, students from the biggest campuses in northwest Beijing broke blocked gates and rushed out to the streets. Soon they joined each other to form a considerably huge, mile-long column.

Most importantly, well before student marchers reached Chang’an Avenue, the main east-west thoroughfare across central Beijing through Tiananmen Square, the west section of Chang’an was already completely empty of motor vehicles. Urban residents from all directions came to fill the broad street, climbing up trees, roofs and billboards along the street, and soon become the major force facing the pre-installed police line on the way leading to Tiananmen. It was these people who eventually pushed away lines of police right in front of Zhongnanhai, the residential compound of Deng Xiaoping and other central Party figures, just to the west of the square. When the marchers kept on eastward after passing the Square and along Chang’an Avenue, supporting bystanders grew rapidly in both number and enthusiastic energy, creating far greater scenes of protest than the then rather exhausted student marchers.

I was walking on the east stretch of the Second Ring Road by early dusk, when all the sudden public loudspeakers on streetlamp poles started broadcasting, after being silent for years since the late 1970s. They said that the government was ready to initiate public dialogues with people from all walks of society. Students and the masses gathered around all broke into cheers. It was rumored at the time that the Party elderly leaders were shocked by what they saw on monitoring screen inside Zhongnanhai and had to rethink how to deal with the crisis. The previous hawkish line was replaced by a softened approach.

When the Big March of April 27 took place, on the student side, the newborn student organization was not only very frail, but had also borne the blow of blackmail from the government in advance. Therefore, though the Big March was a surprise success to both students and the government, it was not a “victory of Reason” as some intellectuals tend to describe it. Nor was it a movement capable of controlling a “victorious retreat,” as some others suggested. Instead, it was a success brought about largely by the unprecedented support of the great masses of Beijing. It was a collective refusal by the society to go back to the old model of top-down social mobilization and management, formed in the post-1969 Cultural Revolution years. The success of the Big March, therefore, powerfully demonstrates the political nature of the 1989 protest movement, as well as its essential demands for political reform of democratization.

On the side of the government, how to handle the protest was inevitably entangled in internal power struggles from the start. After Hu Yaobang’s funeral on April 22, Zhao Ziyang, the then General-secretary of the Party, went to visit North Korea, leaving the mess to Party functionaries to be handled in an “old fashioned” way that led to the issuing of the April 26 Editorial. On the other hand, the turnabout of official policy on the evening of April 27, trailing the success of the Big March, shows that internal discord and uncertainty were already present inside the highest level of the Party leadership. Policymakers were still searching for ways to get out of trouble--if threatening intimidation did not work, then let us try a friendlier face. Following this, then, we saw a number of new moves: partly televised – and, again, unprecedented in the PRC – dialogue between the State Council’s spokesperson and selected students on April 29; a series of talks Zhao Ziyang gave in early May, openly commenting on economic reforms passing the “test of market” and political reforms the “test of democratization”; and the unusual permission secured on May 13 by the famous woman journalist Dai Qing to publish on a whole page of the official Guangming Daily a forum’s transcript by leading liberal intellectuals. How could anyone have imagined these “new directions” had there not been the Big March on April 27? To accuse the students of “getting involved in the Party’s internal power struggle” after Martial Law was issued on May 20, as if the youngsters uncannily destroyed a wonderful promising future, is an unrealistically optimistic view of the situation before that date.

The fundamental nature of the 1989 Chinese conflict lies in the masses’ demands for the rights of political participation, in opposition to the CCP regime’s determination not to share its political power with society. To commemorate those who lost their lives in the bloody military suppression, it is necessary for us, I believe, to insist on what the “Tiananmen Mothers” group, led by Ding Zilin who lost her 17-year-old son to the June Fourth Massacre, has put forward as the principles in dealing with this painful historical scar:

Speaking out the truth; refusing to forget; pursuing justice; and appealing to conscience. 

Rambling Notes: Tracing “Old Shanghai” at the Futuristic Heart of “New China”

By Niv Horesh

Shanghai is in many ways the face of the new People’s Republic. Even as the city has been remade in recent decades, efforts are underway to selectively salvage what remains of its pre-war architectural heritage (1842-1937) and many of its archival records are becoming accessible to foreign researchers. Touted as Asia’s biggest and most cosmopolitan urban centre in the pre-war era, Shanghai has (re)emerged over the last two decades as “a harbinger of China’s future and a testing ground for the world at large.”

It is therefore worth reprising Shanghai’s distant treaty-port past not just as tourist-trivia pursuit: the past also offers a perspective from which to observe the imminent rise of the city to global prominence.

Memory Lane

One of few exhilarating privileges Shanghai history buffs can nowadays enjoy is staying at the city’s oldest-running hotel, the tactfully-refurbished Astor House (est. 1846), near Suzhou Creek. In its heyday, The Astor hosted luminaries like US President Ulysses S. Grant, Charlie Chaplin, Guglielmo Marconi, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and even Zhou Enlai. A 15-minute walk due south, along the ceaselessly re-vamped Bund is the Shanghai Municipal Archives. There, history buffs can relish on demand letters written by the managers of the very same Astor over a century ago, complaining to the foreign-run Shanghai Municipal Council about “natives,” “coolies” and “rickshaws” making too much noise for patrons to bear.

Returning to the Astor from the Archives, history buffs cannot but note that road hazards and noise are still a feature of the hotel environment; however, Santanas have by now supplanted rickshaws as the most common means of transport, and whites no longer run the municipal council. Neither is there a sign of Shanghai’s once ubiquitous double-deckers and trams, though Soviet-style electric-powered buses still ply the routes between the Bund and Nanjing Road. Back in the 1940s Shanghai’s traffic amenities fired up rustic imagination, with newly-imported American automobiles and regular flights serving the high-heeled between the city and Hong Kong, as was beautifully captured in Eileen Chang’s classic screenplay Taitai wansui. The comparable traffic novelty at present is the fact that one can, as of this year, board direct flights from Pudong International Airport to Taipei after decades of cross-strait political chill.

China’s relative openness is evident elsewhere too. Official mouthpieces like the China Daily unabashedly carry the occasional translated op-ed piece from Japan’s Asahi Shinbun. And against the backdrop of a global financial crisis, the local press is explicitly calling for a more transparent central-government stimulus package to the provinces, warning that such ad hoc funding might be siphoned off by corrupt officials.

This openness can also be felt in any Shanghai bookshop one walks into: Nobel prize winner Gao Xingjian’s titles are still off limits, but one does find a local variant of Obamania with the First Lady’s translated biography selling fast alongside localized editions of anything from Forbes to Marie Claire; DVDs of American sitcoms like Friends; scores of yoga exercise books; European classics from Dickens to Zola. Even the flippant Lonely Planet travel guides are on offer in Chinese, though the LP volume on the PRC itself presumably contained too much politically sensitive commentary to be approved by censors. The sheer variety of printed matter is such that one is even tempted for a second to comb shelves for a Chinese novel of Slumdog Millionaire appeal, only to realize that such searing social critique of the inequalities attending “emerging economies” clearly cannot be accommodated even in this era of PRC openness.

As Jeff Wasserstrom described in his Japan Focus article (“Red Shanghai, Blue Shanghai”), the hype surrounding Shanghai is set to peak during Expo 2010 with the inauguration of a huge pavilion and bridge complex in Pudong combining traditional Chinese motifs and the last word in urban design. Already, visitors cannot but marvel at Shanghai’s cityscape, which is rapidly being transformed, while preservation of pre-war architecture is almost inevitably taking the back seat. Unlike Beijing, where the global economic turnaround has cast a pall over the Olympics construction frenzy, leaving much office space practically empty -- high-rise construction in Shanghai still seems in full swing, presumably in anticipation that demand will hold as the city prepares for Expo 2010. The official press is buoyant, but elsewhere pundits talk of a major glut and impending price collapse. What will happen the day after Expo 2010 closes is anyone’s guess.

Skyscrapers have by now popped up well beyond the pre-war city perimeters. The suburb of Jiangwan, for example, had remained all but a ghost-town on the northern outskirts, even as the KMT was trying to turn it into the city’s new civic center in the late 1930s. The KMT-built Jiangwan stadium, once Asia’s largest white elephant, and the eerily empty civic library are still there. But the suburb has re-invented itself as a hi-tech and tertiary-education powerhouse where Oracle’s China headquarters, amongst other multinationals, are located.

The North-eastern suburb of Wusong, on the mouth of the Huangpu River, was until the 1980s a sparsely-populated (though strategically important) frontier. It is now a crowded mesh of maritime warehouses and shopping malls. The local Qing-era cannon platform (Wusong paotai) is the only reminder of the old frontier. The real frontier nowadays is South-western suburbia where Disney-fied compounds are being built for the nouveau riche; there is now a huge gated community with perfectly Victorian streets in Songjiang (“Thamestown”) and a “German New Town” near Volkswagen’s plant in Anting.

As indicated above, the city’s geographical features are quite different than the pre-war setting in both name and substance. Some milestones endured: Nanjing Road is still Nanjing Road; the once patently louche Great World Amusement Centre (Da shijie) and carefree Wing On (Yong An) Department Store are still there, albeit tamed by state ownership; the exquisite Huxinting tea house, one of China’s oldest, endures millions of tourists annually. But true to communist frugality, “Yan’an Road” was chosen to replace “Edward VII Avenue” in what was once the International Settlement. And in what was once the French Settlement, Huaihai Road replaced the famous “Avenue Joffre.”

In the 1950s, a Soviet-style Exhibition Centre was built over the semi-legendary Hardoon Garden; streets once named after foreign tycoons like Silas Hardoon or Chinese financier Yu Xiaqing have been “rectified.” The semi-legendary race course, once the lynchpin of expatriate social life, has been carved up to make way for the People’s Square – Asia’s semicolonial horseracing streak lives on in Hong Kong and, more recently, a few new mainland locations.

China’s erstwhile “Fleet Street,”Wangping Road, is now Shandong Road. But the unique pre-war vibrancy of that area in which scores of independent publishers thrived is long gone. So too are many of the quaint creeks and canals which once crisscrossed the city, and were reclaimed in the 1910s to make way for tenements and roads – their traces are barely evident in street names carrying the suffix bang 浜 or gang 港 for “waterway.” Similarly, the wall which had once encircled Nantao, or the “Native City,” is only evident in the crescent shape which Renmin Road and Zhonghua Road form.

The Pudong-Puxi Antonym

Lying east of the Huangpu River, the ultra-modern precinct of Pudong was first envisioned by Sun Yat-sen. In the 1920s, he dreamed of a Chinese-run Shanghai that would overshadow what expatriates called “the model settlement,” namely, the International and French concession areas west of the Huangpu River (Puxi).

Pudong’s spectacular skyline and its sleek Century Avenue were built only in the last two decades, much faster than any other comparable city in the West. If during Sun’s time, and through much of the PRC’s history, the Bund’s waterfront edifices connoted Shanghai’s prosperity under European tutelage, today’s Pudong vicariously lives up to Sun’s vision of overshadowing the old foreign concessions. This symbolism is by no means lost on Shanghai history buffs, and was most certainly on urban planners’ minds in the late 1980s. The Bund’s colonial flavor has been wonderfully preserved, cynics might add, precisely so that it can be dwarfed by Chinese-developed high-rise construction to the east.

As if to make the historical analogy clear, urban planners ensured that every bit of the Bund’s neo-classical and art-deco gems would be meticulously preserved at the expense of most other heritage sites elsewhere in Puxi. In recent years, agile state-backed property developers have been able to take over some of these neglected sites, turning them into exclusive “Old Shanghai”-themed hotels. The great majority, however, still lie dilapidated. More often than not, their 1930s grandeur is drowned out by prosaic eye-sores like shabby air-con wiring or by garish nearby office-blocks.

***

Clearly, Pudong is built to overawe visitors: many of its waterfront skyscrapers not only rank among the tallest in the world, but also light up at night, morphing into gigantic LCD screens. Their glass veneers carry a corny blend of commercials and local-government slogans calling on locals to, among other things, congenially greet visitors from other parts of China in standard Mandarin.



The place has definitely got a “Blade-Runner” feel to it, with multinationals headquartered there in magnificent high-rises, alongside even greater high-rises housing newly-established, semi state-owned corporate entities that are aggressively primed to become the Sonys and IBMs of tomorrow. It boasts the world’s only magnetic-traction bullet train (Mag-Lev) and a state-of-the-art subway system and Zeppelins constantly screen commercials and slogans overhead as they waft between skyscrapers.

Gazing at Pudong from across the river, Shanghai seems unfazed by the global financial crisis: the official line pledges to steam ahead with greater investment in higher-education and R&D (Kejiao xing shi). Amid the shine and sparkle, many locals have reassured this history buff that the global financial crisis was not going to hit Shanghai at all. Otherwise, why would banking giant HSBC erect its new 250-metre tall China headquarters in Pudong ? Such, we are told, is the bank’s “confidence… in the Chinese economy” that its Pudong home would be much taller than its Hong Kong base (180 m) or, for that matter, its London world headquarters (200 m).

There is canny symbolism to all of this. Completed in 1923, the much smaller domed building which rules the Bund skyline on the opposite bank was once HSBC’s old China headquarters. That was an era when HSBC was China’s de facto central bank. In the 1950s, this building was expropriated by the CCP, and in a wry twist of fate, is now home to the state-owned Pudong Development Bank.



In another twist of fate, foreign banks whose forerunners are less associated with colonialism are returning to the Bund waterfront; Citibank and ABN AMRO are but two examples. The former case is particularly interesting since Citibank’s other Shanghai building dominates Pudong’s skyline from across the river. Citibank accentuates, in that sense, an affiliation with both “Old” and “New” Shanghai. But the big question, of course, is whether Citibank’s upbeat China outlook can help mitigate its sub-prime shemozzle at home. Or could it be that Shanghainese optimism is misguided, and Wall Street will eventually catch up with Century Avenue?

AIG was a supposedly invincible multinational now groaning under the load of US-derived bad debt – this group and its executive bonuses are the talk of the day in Wall Street and on Capitol Hill. However, it seems that only history buffs are aware that AIG actually owes its rise to prominence to Shanghai in the first place. It was here that Cornelius Vander Starr set up the American International Group without much fanfare in 1919. Like HSBC, AIG relocated after the Communist take-over to eventually become one of the largest financial arbiters in the world. Like HSBC, it returned to China with a vengeance in the 1990s. But unlike HSBC, which has survived sub-prime vertigo relatively well, AIG’s future existence is uncertain. Thus, this is not only a question of Wall Street catching up with Century Avenue, but also of the PRC reminding Wall Street and Capitol Hill of Shanghai’s global stature in times past, and of staking out what it sees as the city’s rightful claim to the future of global finance.

***

Is the claim legitimate? Granted, for all its hype Pudong does connote quite a bit of contrivance. At dusk, the neon lights loom large, but on closer look the precinct does not exactly teem with life, and traffic is surprisingly light for a Chinese city.

For a moment, one cannot but wonder if Pudong, too, was perhaps an artifact of sub-prime-like self-delusion. It is, after all, well-known that the central government has poured billions of yuan into this area, often with very little scrutiny. The Mag-Lev is a striking example: for all its gripping special-effects and dazzling speed, it fails to reach populous Puxi, and is therefore hardly-used by commuters. Its main proponent, former mayor Chen Liangyu, now languishes in jail on corruption charges.

Pudong’s skyline clearly offers a counterpoint to the enduring mystique of “Old Shanghai.”[1] But despite two decades of heady redevelopment, for most Shanghainese the west bank beckons brighter, as this popular saying suggests: “I’d rather have a bed to lie on in Puxi than own a whole flat in Pudong!” (Ningyao Puxi yi zhang chuang, bu yao Pudong yi jian fang 宁要浦西一张床，不要浦东一间房!).

This hints at a deeper sentiment: for many Pudong is still too contrived and showy. It lacks the historical sediment of Puxi, nowadays re-enacted in Puxi in upmarket theme malls such as Xintiandi. One history buff’s blog captures this desire with the phrase shili yangcheng (十里洋场), a four-character expression connoting the “wondrous metropolis of foreign flavours”, which was renowned the world over in the 1930s for its ballrooms, cinemas, cafes, and bars.

What’s more, stunning skyscrapers are increasingly being built around Puxi too. They often encircle what little remains of Shanghai’s distinctive pre-war shikumen tenements. Chinglish, on the other hand, is still alive and well despite the catch-cry of globalization. Thus, for example, People’s Square is rendered “Civilised Park” on a prominent plaque at the entrance. Below the Square is a huge underground shopping arcade themed after “Old Shanghai” with 1930s-style peep shows (la yangpian 拉洋片) and distorting mirrors (haha jing 哈哈镜).

The arcade is one of many venues capitalizing on “Old Shanghai” mystique, ranging from the quirky history museum at the Oriental Pearl TV Tower basement, to restaurants professing to serve “Old Shanghai” fare, to countless “Old Shanghai” brand names.

The Last Word

For all the reasons described above, Shanghai has (re)emerged as a magnet for visitors, micro- entrepreneurs and laborers from all over China. It is also attracting more and more Western expatriates of all socio-economic rungs, though their ratio of the city’s population is still smaller than in the 1930s.

That said, we should reserve the last word for the Shanghainese themselves. They are not – and cannot be – the enterprising sojourners of “Old Shanghai.” Ironically, the strict hukou residency restrictions of Mao’s era nurtured an elitist, linguistically and culturally cohesive sense of Shanghaineseness. The city was quite subdued during the 1989 student protest movement, and has since 1991 been smothered in preferential central-government funding.

The Shanghainese of today are a “born-and-bred” privileged corps. Though clearly approving of foreigners, they are often said to be haughty and suspicious of other Chinese. They are described as much more inward-looking and risk-averse than their migrant-society forebears: those resourceful sojourners who had converged on the city from every corner of China at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, for all their perceived shortcomings, today’s Shanghainese project optimism. This history buff is convinced Shanghai will weather the global financial crisis, and maintain its growth momentum for the most part. The end-product, though, may not eclipse “Old Shanghai” insofar as cosmopolitanism, openness and innovation are concerned. Other parts of China may (or may not) fill the gap.

That Shanghai and its dwellers are future-bound there can be no doubt. But whether Shanghai is the future is another question.

[1] On the enduring mystique of ‘Old Shanghai’ see e.g. Hugo Restall’s excellent piece [March 5, 2009] in the Wall Street Journal

Follow-up Interview with Lijia Zhang, author of Socialism is Great!

Last June, Nicole Barnes of the China Beat interviewed Lijia Zhang, author of the acclaimed book Socialism is Great!, whose paperback edition has just been released by RandomHouse. Here is a follow-up interview with Ms. Zhang about her recent (and ongoing) book tour, her upcoming book, and women's issues in Asia:

Nicole Barnes: You recently completed your book tour for Socialism is Great! Where did you speak about your book?

Lijia Zhang: I have not completed my book tour yet. My French publisher has promised to invite me for a promotional tour this autumn when the French version comes out. I’ll also visit Holland where the Dutch translation has just been published. It is being translated into Hebrew, and I am sure that there will be more to follow.

I spoke at various festivals: literature festivals in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, the LA Times Festival of Books, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India.

I’ve given many talks at universities, book stores, organizations and institutions interested in China and foreign correspondents clubs. I’ve also received invitations to talk to women’s groups and multinational companies as an inspirational speaker.

NB: Were the audiences different in each location (did you see different mixes of men and women, ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese, etc)? Where did you get the best reception?

LZ: The book isn’t distributed in China, unfortunately. My Chinese friends, of course, all claim to like the book. One woman from Shanghai telephoned me to thank me for recording an era which seemed to have been forgotten. One young man wrote to me to question if the "period police" was true. I assured him that was just common practice. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some young nationalistic youths didn’t like the book.

I think the popularity of the book also reflects a rising interest in China. Many in the West also feel uncomfortable about China and China’s rapid rise. I get lots of questions along that line: what’s China’s future? Is China a threat to the world?

The best reaction I received was in India. I attended the Jaipur Literature Festival and toured the country a little. My publisher HarperCollins promoted me as the first Chinese writer to be published in India. The book, and myself indeed, received massive media attention – about 20 reviews and profile stories.

NB: In the China Beat review of Indian author Pallavi Aiyar's book Smoke and
Mirrors: An Experience of China, Aiyar mentions that she felt safer and freer as a woman in China than in India. When you were in India, did anything strike you as particularly revealing of gender differences between the two countries?

LZ: I love India. It is such a colorful place with vibrant culture and friendly people. Aiyar is actually a friend of mine. I tend to agree with her there. Foreign women probably feel safer and freer in China. Personally, I did have some propositions in India (I’ve been there three times), but no really unpleasant experience.

Educated Indian women are very assertive, free, and their values and life styles are not that different from those of Western women. It’s a completely different ball game for the poor rural women. I met a 27-year-old young widow in a desert village in Rajistan. She is supposed to live the rest of her life on her own. I am also amazed by the caste system and how democracy has not crushed it and how it has not granted women a more liberal and tolerant social environment.

Overall, I think women in China are better off than are their sisters in India.

NB: After you've seen international reactions to your book, is there anything you would have done differently in it, such as sections that you would have deleted or expanded upon?

LZ: So many people asked me what happened. I should have written an epilogue to update the readers on the main happenings of my life. As a matter of fact, I’ve done so for the paperback edition, which has just been released.

NB: Did anything about your reception or people's reactions to your book surprise you?

LZ: Overall, I am surprised and absolutely delighted by the reaction, which has been better than I ever expected.

A friend half-joked with me, saying it’s a girly book. But I’ve found that people across the board seem to have taken a liking to the book. I often get e-mails from readers who congratulate me for a writing a book they enjoyed; some ask what happened after the book and others demand a sequel. One Australian man threatened, "if you don’t write a sequel, I’ll go to Tiananmen to shout your name until you do so!" In fact, most of these people are men. Last night, a man from America called me in the middle of the night just to say how much he loved the book!

NB: What book are you working on now?

LZ: I am revising my first novel Lotus, about prostitution in modern day China – not based on real life experience but a pure work of fiction.

NB: What led you to that topic?

LZ: My grandma was a low-grade prostitute, like the leading character in the book. I always have this fascination about her life and how she coped. For me, prostitution is just a vehicle to explore social tensions caused by fast changes in society.

They Chose China Now at YouTube

Last year, China Beat ran a review of Shuibo Wang's fascinating documentary, They Chose China. The documentary traces the stories of American POWs who chose to stay in China after the 1953 Korean War armistice. 

At the time that we ran that review, we noted that the video was hard to come by. Now, however, the entire documentary has been posted on YouTube, in five parts. We've posted all five parts below (and here are direct links to YouTube for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V). Those interested in learning more might also be interested in this recent interview with director Shuibo Wang. 

The (Model) UN Comes to Beida

In our ongoing effort to draw attention from time to time to blogs about China we come across and like (as we did in this recent post), we want to let our readers know about an intriguing one we’ve just started following. Six, maintained by Alec Ash, was recently singled out by CNReviews (another new addition to our RSS feed list, which we’ll doubtless start linking to regularly now that we’ve discovered it) as one of the “ten eclectic China blogs” worth following.

Rather than explain Six’s features to you, we asked Ash to let us repost a piece from it. Writing from Beida at the time of the May 4th commemorations, he provided us with the comments you’ll find below. (And, incidentally, if after reading what follows, you are still in a May 4th mood, check out Ash’s post about how that date was marked this year at Beida and also his interview with Rana Mitter, who provided China Beat with a Top 5 list of readings on China’s 1919.)

By Alec Ash

It was the young students at Peking University ninety years ago on May 4, 1919, who changed China’s future. Just like it was those twenty years ago who were out on Tiananmen Square. Now there is a new generation at Beida (the shorthand Chinese name for the university), and one way or another they too will be shaping China's future.

As a foreign student at Beida, I started the blog (called “6”) to follow the stories of six Chinese acquaintances my age. My idea is to trace what young Chinese - at Beida and also elsewhere in Beijing - are thinking, reading, talking about and spending their time on. So there’s Marie, the sexy-jazz dancing student of A.I.; William, the college drop-out environmental activist; Ben, the smalltime graduate entrepreneur; even a Beida student who calls himself “Leonidas.” Follow the blog for more...

In the spirit of May 4th, below the China Beat is kindly republishing one of my posts: comments from a friend at Beida who was secretary-general of this year’s model UN, the Chinese version of which is hosted at the university.

I’ll preface it with one on-the-ground observation, no doubt an unsurprising one: today’s students at Beida, even (especially) the politically minded ones, are a far cry from those out on the Square twenty years ago - let alone ninety! With brighter prospects than ever, there is more for them to lose by speaking out against a system which they (on the whole) regard as the best bet to solve China’s problems. For example, when Beida professor Sun Dongdong claimed 99 percent of petitioners were mentally ill last month, hundreds of petitioners sat outside the university gates in protest, but I didn't hear a single student express their outrage (I blogged about this at Six). So the change this generation will be wreaking will likely be from within the system, not outside it with a banner in their hands.

Tony is a humblingly politically aware friend of mine at Beida. No surprises, I guess, as his dad works in the Foreign Ministry. He’s 21, a Beijinger - grandparents from Hubei - in his third year of a Politics and International Relations course here. And last week, he was secretary-general of the United Nations.

Yes, yes, the model UN - where students take on the roles of diplomats of other countries and battle out the issues of the day. Its incarnation on Chinese soil is held at Beida each spring (they have a website). I first got wind that Tony was this year’s secretary general when I saw him walking across campus in a suit, shuai as Shanghai, followed by a small army of delegates passing him half a dozen mobiles to answer like a troupe of bizarrely up-market phone hawkers.

So I asked Tony to tell us a bit about his experience; in particular how Chinese students react to the diplomatic setting of model UN. He very kindly sent me this long email:

I cannot express to you how delighted I am to see nearly 500 delegates coming from five continents to discuss global issues and exchange their point of views. During a whole year’s preparation, what continuously comes to my mind is a question like this: how can we Chinese students understand ourselves better in this international event? 170 years ago, China was drawn into the tide of globalization. Because of the lack of knowledge about the outside world, the uneasy feeling towards open-up lasts till now. In China, there is a old saying: it is commendable for a man to know himself truly.

But the 21st century is an epoch in which we can only know ourselves until we know the world. The Chinese are now building up new identities through comparison with other countries, through conflict and compromise when dealing with various challenges on the global agenda. This is exactly what we do in the Model UN. In China, in fact, the activity itself is on the rise and students are now learning to express themselves according to international rules, trying their best to enter into the common language system, putting themselves in other’s shoes and then look back at their own country.

But I digress. What I would like to share with you is the setbacks faced by Chinese students in the model UN and probably also the obstacles faced by China in becoming a responsible stakeholder.

The Asian International Model UN (AIMUN) is neither an English contest nor a competition in choosing for the best delegate. Many Chinese participants speak fluent English, acquire the rules of procedure and devote themselves in every discussion. But they still face obstacles in communication. On the last day of the conference, a faculty advisor from South America expressed to me her concern that many Chinese delegates speak out of point and always use Chinese during unmoderated caucus, thus forming small blocks in the conference room.

I also mentioned to you last time about the “draft resolution (DR)” issue. In AIMUN, there could be only one DR passed per topic area. For many Chinese students, sponsoring a DR and persuading other delegates to vote for it into the final resolution is a great pride and an expression of the contribution he/she has made in solving a certain global problem. I guess there are basically two reasons why the Chinese care about being the sponsor of DR a lot. Firstly, some students/universities become too utilitarian when it comes to awards.

Many of them take AIMUN a competition held by Beida and their goal is to win the best delegate/delegation award. As an organizer, I understand that many students come to Beijing funded by local schools, so they need to bring a certain “title” home. In fact, many Chinese universities treat it quite seriously as if this is an award given by PKU officials.

The second reason is simple, the Chinese students used to be minorities in model UN conferences. For example, when asked about their experience in Harvard US National Model UN, the Chinese participants will often express to you the annoyance of their well-prepared DRs being separated by aggressive Western delegates so that they can never gain the leadership in shaping the final outcome. Though AIMUN is an international conference, most of the delegates are coming from Asian countries. After all, many Chinese delegates think this is a conference held in China and they have some advantages to let others rally around the Chinese flags.

This may seem interesting, but it did give me a headache last week. In 2-3 committees, piles of DRs were of poor quality, conflicts rode over cooperation, but no one would compromise. Last week in our model ASEAN 10+3 Ministerial Summit, when discussing about the pirates in Malacca, two DRs were backed by different country blocks and both were not willing to give in or merge their resolutions with the other. The debate nearly led to personal attack between two Chinese delegates (and in fact, the boy made that girl cry because of his harsh words). Fortunately, they combined the two DRs into a new one because the meeting was coming to an end.

I also found out that Chinese delegates became somehow out of mind when involved in discussions about international law/institutions. That could be explained in some part by the lack of multilateral diplomatic practice of China. This year, we had the UN General Assembly-Legal, which involves 134 delegates discussing international law and global terrorism. This is the largest committee among 12 in AIMUN 2009. In fact, whether we should set up a legal committee this year raised heated discussion among the secretariat, because most of the delegates are not familiar with how a legal committee works.

Not to our surprise, the discussion was not at all “legal” and consensus became more difficult to build among such a number of delegates. But anyway, I think it is a step forward in China to raise university students’ awareness about how IR and international law are interrelated.

I must to confess that organizing international Model UN activities is not without embarrassments. I think there’s no need for me to list a few, but some topics are indeed not welcome here in Beida and the school also forbid the association to send delegations abroad when such topics was chosen in other Model UN conferences (I remembered the Harvard National Model UN once modeled a committee after the 1952 CPPCC and Beida refused to issue students approvals). We also invited 15 delegates representing NGOs in AIMUN, which irritated the university a lot.

The problem is, the organizing committee involves a lot of foreign students in Beida, it is indeed an embarrassment for me to explain to them what is allowed and what is not. Sometimes I am the person who negotiates and compromises with various bureaus, cuts down sensitive topics and lessens the number of foreign delegates in order to make AIMUN survive. After all, it is not that serious like National People’s Congress, right? We are just running a student activity. See if we can discuss these issues next time, Alec. I hope it will interest you as it interests me.

Any thoughts or takes on this? Is this Model UN for China’s leaders of tomorrow as important as the National People’s Congress? Do the actions of these Chinese delegates representing foreign countries say anything about attitudes towards multilateral diplomacy in China? Tony would love to hear some reactions, as he is considering writing his thesis on this…

The New May Fourth Spirit

China Beat has been running excerpts from Philip J Cunningham's forthcoming memoir, Tiananmen Moon; Inside the Chinese Student Uprising in 1989, which will be published in May by Rowman & Littlefield. This excerpt addresses the events of May 4, 1989. Readers can also read the first, second, and third in this series at China Beat or read more at Cunningham's website.

By Philip J Cunningham

The sun is rising. At Beijing Normal University, red flags flutter and unfurl in the early morning breeze above the sports ground. Thousands of students mill about, excitedly falling into groups and lining up to take to the streets and march to Tiananmen Square.

The great May Fourth demonstration is underway despite stern warnings in the press and strict police orders not to take the protest to the streets. That's the real May Fourth Spirit! Defiance in the face of danger! Knock down the old, make way for the new! Challenge authority!

The early morning air is refreshingly cool with only the faintest trace of coal dust now that the long winter is over. Animated, nervous, smiling faces bask in the honey-colored glow of a brilliant morning sun. Even the birds, rare as they are in Beijing, add to the defiant chorus!

Seize the hour! Seize the day! Wake up! China, Wake up!

The atmosphere is electric; but the movement of rebel forces gentle, cooperative and fluidly choreographed.

Large red banners with bright yellow characters of the kind used in school sports meets announce group affiliations such as History Department, Educational Psychology, Arts Choral Group, but it is the national flag of China that takes the place of honor in the student color guard.

Self-appointed student leaders run around the thickening assembly of students with battery-operated megaphones trying to get others to listen, trying to instill order and decorum.

"Please remember discipline!" one voice shouts. "Find your department, look for the banners!"

"Stay with your group!" another one screeches, as static and feedback from the megaphones start to obscure the message.

"Remember to stay with people you know!"

"Song sheets are available from the Arts Choral Group."

Cloth headbands are passed around. Student scribes dash off calligraphy calling for dialogue on sheets of plain cloth and cardboard using ink brushes and felt-tip pens.

Already the air is humming with music. In the middle of the gathering, two accordion players are bellowing and bouncing, rehearsing some morale-boosting numbers for the day's march. There are not enough mimeographed song sheets to go around so marchers scribble down lyrics in their notebooks, copying them off handout sheets and public blackboards. No cribbing is needed for the Internationale, as everyone knows the anthem inside out.

Why sing a song embraced by the establishment? The idea is brilliant in a way. If you sing it enough, you own it. The communist-indoctrinated youth of Beijing are waving the red flag to beat the red flag, employing iconic rhetoric of rebellion to remake China in their own image.

"DO WE HAVE TO WAIT ANOTHER 70 YEARS?"

There it is again. The students are willfully making parallels between their situation and the progenitor of all student demonstrations. The social and creative explosion that followed the May Fourth demonstration at Tiananmen Gate in 1919 led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Once the party took power, it enshrined the 1919 student demonstration as an icon of Chinese communism.

The mood is light, cheerful; the air full of familiar shouts, earthy Beijing greetings and boisterous sing-alongs. There's a kind of safety in numbers, at least psychological safety. If many people are doing something, and don't start to panic, the risk that an individual will be singled out for punishment decreases. Non-participation involves a risk too, the risk of being left on the wrong side of history. Conditioned by decades of campaigns and crackdowns, Chinese understandably look to those around them for clues on how to behave. It's not so much follow the leader as follow other followers.

Standing in the swirling, excited pack of protesters, I am hit with a pang of self-consciousness. Not because I am over six-foot tall, a 190-pound blond man in a sea of black hair and thin physiques; this is a political rally in a country where foreigners live in separate buildings, eat in different restaurants and shop in different stores using different money from local people. Everywhere I go, thousands of curious and sometimes resentful eyes observe my every move. Any lapse of judgment on my part will be magnified many times over because of the stigma of difference.

I am not the only one hit with this sense of not belonging. Beside me stands Lao Ni, who had seen enough excitement for one day. He had seen enough to tell his friends in Taiwan, he was getting ready to leave.

Bright and Jenny find me by the side of the road watching parade ranks being organized by departmental affiliation.

"Jin Peili! Are you going to join us or just watch?" Bright asks provocatively.

"I don't know," I answer, trying to imagine myself as others saw me. "I mean, I'm a wai-guo-ren."

"Are you afraid?" Jenny teases, eyebrows arching in disbelief.

"No, not really."

"Then take a stand with us!" Bright is insistent, bordering on seductive.

Without another word she takes me by the arm and leads me past a throng of people into the middle of the arts choral group. Just then there is a ripple of excited whispers whipping across the staging ground. Word has just come in that the student marchers from other colleges have reached Beitaiping Zhuang intersection just north of campus and that it is time to fall into formation behind departmental flags to break out of the gated, guarded campus. "Jin Peili is marching with us,” Bright says, assigning me a cohort to march with.

Somehow being placed in the middle of the music section is reassuring.

"Arise, you enslaved people!" cry out a dozen voices in Arts Choral Group, "Do not say we have nothing. We shall be the masters of the world. This is the final struggle. . ."

The Internationale is effective in jump-starting the march. It is sung with such repetition that it is soon one of those tunes that you can't get it out of your head.

Doubts mount as we are forced to take a roundabout path to find a way past the padlocked bars of the southeast campus gate. The student vanguard discovers a passable exit through the narrow doorway adjacent to the vestibule manned by campus security. A row of policemen is visible just outside the bars of the gate, but we outnumber them by the hundreds, if not thousands.

Guards or no guards, there is no stopping the rush off campus once the first few students squeeze through. We break ranks, forcefully propelled forward through the passageway to face the unknown. Like grains of sand slipping down the thin neck of an hourglass, dropping past a point of no return.

As we emerge on the street, two campus security agents plead with some flustered students to immediately return to campus. The narrowness of the makeshift exit had forced everyone to go more or less single file, causing each marcher to step out alone, momentarily isolated from the group and vulnerable. The procession quickly reassembles into departmental groups aided by the waving of banners and shouts of student facilitators. Cars and buses on the wide thoroughfare outside the school gate are slowed and then halted as the road is inundated by wave after wave of protesters pouring off campus. Traffic on the wide avenue comes to a complete halt.

A long line of police watch intently from the far side of the road. They are ridiculously outnumbered and make no serious attempt to stop the onrush. Immobilized automobiles get swallowed up, lapped by bodies on all sides, like listing ships in a turbulent sea. From the north comes a spirited procession of students from other schools, and in no time students fill the road as far as the eye can see.

Bright banners for Beijing University, Qinghua University, and Political Science and Law University are hoisted above the heads of the crowd on bamboo poles, flapping in the wind, cracking like whips. As the assembly of students flows tentatively south towards Tiananmen Square, the police back off and let the human mass proceed towards the city center. Are the police in shock and intimidated by the stupendous size of the crowd or silently supportive, won over by the contagious, ebullient spirit of the young protesters? Either way, they do nothing but watch.

Pedestrians start gawking too, cyclists sit on their bikes, unable to cruise forward, curious about the disturbance. Most of the inconvenienced commuters stare in dumbfounded silence, though a few shout words of support and clap at the ragtag student army marching down the street. Passengers stranded on stalled buses peer out their rectangular windows, surveying the scene.

The police ignore the law-breaking students, but the students do not ignore the police. Instead some fast-thinking students try to win the day with cheerful improvisation and song.

"The people love the People's Police!"
"The People's Police love the people!"

Three policemen climb onto the roof of a stalled bus to better survey the unstoppable horde. They exhibit neither amusement nor anger. Some uniformed officers remove their hats, as if off duty, others stand stiffly at attention. Are they mesmerized by the irrepressible optimism of the marchers or just waiting for orders? We stream confidently past several lines of police, as the rhythmic drone of accordions cue a series of crisp rhyming chants. Word quickly reaches us that police blockades erected a short distance down the road have been penetrated by the vanguard of flag-waving marchers, so spirits mount and the student parade picks up speed. The demonstration flows southward on Xinwai Road, coursing past nondescript walled compounds containing military hospitals, factories and apartment blocks.

As we approach Xiaoxitian, near the China Film building, a few hardy members of the international press corps are in evidence on the side of the road. Ensconced inside a Chinese crowd in motion I return the gaze of people who look more or less like me as they attempt to capture images of something that might turn out to be a newsworthy event. Caucasian men hastily clamber up ladders and balance heavy cameras on broad shoulders to take aim and record the progress of an unauthorized May Fourth protest that already has a whiff of history about it. Seeing an opportunity, perhaps even protection in the regard of unblinking black lenses, the arts choral group enthusiastically plunges into song.

"Everyone unite! The Internationale shall certainly be realized..."

The marchers around me ham it up, they strut and swing and cry their hearts out, happy to have been observed, at once defiant, but eager for validation.

We surge southwards like a river swollen with rain, seeking Tiananmen. Crossing Second Ring Road, one of Beijing's key arteries, brings east-west traffic to a halt, leaving taxis and busses stranded and abandoned. Meanwhile, construction workers halt their heavy lifting to line the streets, some of them waving and shouting rowdily. As if on cue, the Arts Choral Group accordion players change tack, “The red sun shall shine all over the globe,” fading out on the line, “The Internationale shall definitely be realized,” to launch a new tune. When I hear the lyrics I know why. It is proletarian agit-prop outreach time.

"Peasants, workers, soldiers, unite together!"

The gaggle explodes in celebration upon hearing the call for solidarity. The rhetoric is not new, but hearing it in this context is.

A strange excitement lifts me. This is the China I have long imagined but never known, the China synonymous with revolution and rebellion that I've read about in history and literature. The energy is inclusive and all encompassing. Can a peaceful people's uprising be in the making?

As the procession moves south along the narrow tree-lined shopping street leading to Xidan, the choral group starts chanting a ditty to the melody to Frere Jacques, slyly co-opting a Young Pioneer anthem.

Dadao guandao! Fandui fubai!
Women yaoqiu minzhu! Women yaoqiu ziyou!
Xiang qian jin! Xiang qian jin!

Down with corruption! Down with nepotism!
We seek democracy! We seek freedom!
March forward! March forward!

The mood of the moment is more fun-loving than militant but political implications of the word dadao, that is to say "down with," are ominous. The mood can't be forever light-hearted and uplifting but need it be mean and outright destructive?

Somewhere along the road to Tiananmen the illegal rag-tag May Fourth demonstration turns into an unsanctioned but broadly tolerated peace march. The implicit militancy of the demonstration at the outset, understandable given a system of government in which a police action was not only possible but likely, was softened by the non-action of the police and the positive response of bystanders along the way. Had there been serious scuffles, arrests or violence between police and marchers or even just conflict between inconvenienced motorists and marchers, the Tiananmen-bound procession would have been forced to choose between conflict and surrender. Instead there was virtually no resistance, which permitted marchers to relax and reach out in a way that reflected how others were responding to them.

By the time we reach Chang’an Boulevard, the numbers are swelling beyond count. Everywhere well-wishers come out of their homes, offices and shops to wave and show support. Police blockades at critical junctions are relaxed as the good-natured vanguard of students wearing sun visors, carrying the sweaters and jackets no longer needed in the midday sun, cheerfully beg cooperation.

A jolt of energy surges through the rapidly moving procession, now numbering ten thousand or more as we reach the northern extremity of the Great Hall of the People and our forbidden destination comes into full view. The protesters around me are sweaty and sunburned, some losing their voices, others already limping from walking miles without a break, but even those unsteady of foot have a bounce in their step, the proud young rebels homing in on the legendary destination that is stage center in Chinese politics.

The crowd picks up speed, those of us near the front of the procession feel an exhilaration as the parade pours onto the vast emptiness of Tiananmen Square, finally coming to rest near the Martyr's Memorial. My group settles in the shadow of Sun Yatsen's portrait, a wood-framed monolith temporarily erected for the national holiday. As thousands join us in due time from universities situated even further away, the throng thickens, and we are surrounded by student contingents on all sides. Yet even now, the vast breadth of the Square dwarfs the growing congregation.

I was supposed to meet Cui Jian and Liu Yuan for lunch today, now I’m in the middle of a crowd in the middle of Tiananmen Square, participating in a demonstration I had merely planned to take a look at.

The rock singer was a musical rebel and effectively expressed his angst in song, but in conversation I rarely found him to be political. If anything, he was cautious, plodding and methodical in his rebelliousness. He sang songs exactly the way he liked to, which ruffled lots of official feathers the wrong way, but he had no desire to push things to the point that he become a persona non grata or forced into exile. So he paid the dues of living in the People’s Republic, including taxes, payment of which was extracted as a corollary of his fame.

Daily life in the People's Republic has been excellent preparation for the practical and dramatic demands of staging political theatre at Tiananmen. It was the art of skirting the edge without crossing the line. It was rebelling within the orthodox vocabulary of rebellion. On what grounds could the May Fourth inspired Communist Party object to a May Fourth march of students waving red banners and singing communist anthems?

Already townspeople were swarming towards the protest, and they too knew how to play they ambiguity game. If questioned they could say they were watching out of curiosity, not in solidarity.

Meanwhile, the police are melting away, which lessens the likelihood of conflict and actually enhances the sense of order. The crowd can do without police because it self-polices. Everyone is under pressure to stay with his own group, remaining under the watchful eyes of peers. There are no explicit rules but there is much order -- order born of years of communal life in a communal society. One instinctively knows how to take turns using the facilities in the family’s cramped apartment, to share a single desk with six roommates in a dorm room, to fall into order and march and sing in state-sponsored youth fests. Functioning in a crowd, cooperating and putting on a show are nothing new to these young communists. This demonstration, though illegal, is being guided by well-honed instincts, it reflects not so much rebellion as an intense expression of everyday values.

The banners around me were both provocative and orthodox, lifted from slogans uttered in generations past.

FREEDOM
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE!
DEMOCRACY AND SCIENCE
UNDER THE SKY, ALL FOR THE PEOPLE

Tiananmen Square! As a protest of uncertain duration begins on the monumental chessboard carved out in the heart of the arid, mountain-ringed plain of Beijing, no one knows for sure where things are going or what will happen next, but the location is deliberate. Tiananmen is the ceremonial stage for a nation of a billion. Nowhere in Beijing does the sky seem wider and grander than over Tiananmen, the sky gate; the place where the sky meets the ground. Scorching hot in the sun, magical in the moonlight, lyrical lookout on the cosmos, celestial yet grounded. Open to the heavens, a conduit of the elements, Tiananmen is the place, if such a place exists, where the mandate of heaven resides; not just a place to celebrate history, but a place to make it, inspired by precedent.

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China’s Bottom Line

We received this note from David Moser in Beijing, reminding us that, at the moment, China is rather quiet. In fact, news reports are that Chinese travelers are avoiding the US and that, financially, China appears to be doing better than expected. Moser writes that the new feeling of security is being reflected in currently circulating jokes…

Translation by David Moser

This text message is being passed around virally this May 1^st holiday. For the first time in my memory, China is feeling safe and comfortable at home. From their vantage point, it’s the rest of the world going to hell!

五一何所见?
北美猪疫黯.
美汽车破产.
法总统服软.
韩审卢武铉.
朝嚷放火箭.
巴伊阿泰惨.
街头扔炸弹.
他乱由他乱.
咱享咱平安.

It’s May First: What’s the bottom line?
North America hit by flu from swine.
U.S. car companies in sharp decline.
The French president has lost his spine.
Roh Moo-hyun’s on the firing line.
The North Korean missile fell into the brine.
Israel, Afghanistan, Thailand, Palestine --
Everywhere you step, a potential land mine.
The rest of the world can worry and whine.
Let’s you and me enjoy China’s Cloud Nine.

Intellectuals and the Nation in China and India: A roundtable report

Last Friday, China Beat and the UCI International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT<) hosted a public roundtable with UC Riverside professor Perry Link and Tiananmen activist Wang Chaohua weighing in on the China side, and writer Pankaj Mishra (a frequent friend of the China Beat) and UCI professor Vinayak Chaturvedi speaking about India. China Beat and UCI’s Jeff Wasserstrom moderated the roundtable discussion, and asked the panelists to consider “dates ending in 9” of specific relevance for China (1919, 1949, 1959, 1979, and 1989) and India (where 9-2 seems to be a more pertinent number, as in 1857 and 1947).

Vinayak Chaturvedi began with a discussion of 1909 as the year of publication of 2 foundational texts in Indian nationalism: Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (or Indian Home Rule) and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Indian War of Independence: 1857, a history of the 1857 “mutiny” (if you were British) and “war of independence” (if you were Indian). [Readers who are intrigued by the reflections of one Vinayak, a UCI professor, on another Vinayak, a Hindu nationalist, can read Dr. Chaturvedi’s article on the same subject in Social History vol. 28 no. 2 (May 2003).] Gandhi’s text and work laid the foundations for the heterogeneous nationalism of a multi-ethnic state as carried forth in the Congress Party, and Savarkar’s text laid the foundations for a militant Hindu nationalism that excludes Muslims and a long list of others, as seen in today’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The two parties and two versions of Indian nationalism have long contested one another, but in the meantime neither has fulfilled its promises to the Indian people.

In addition to being a long-term activist, Wang Chaohua is also an academic with research interests in the May Fourth movement of 1919, and editor of the pre-eminent collection of contemporary Chinese intellectuals’ essays, One China, Many Paths. She argued that the best way to understand Tiananmen in 1989 is to compare it with 1919. In both periods the Chinese government was rather disoriented and fairly weak, and activists used similar methods of organizing themselves. The most important common feature is that in both movements, activists allied across class and occupation to create a broader social movement of students, laborers, and white-collar urban workers. Unfortunately, Dr. Wang ended on a sad note. Many people ask her about the prospects of greater freedom for mainland Chinese, but she feels that the current University students in China are even more urban and bourgeois than before so they are less likely to create such a broad-based movement.

Perry Link noted that he was in Beijing in 1989 and attended two events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth movement. Government officials in Beijing hosted a grand event in which they labeled the movement as the foundation of Chinese nationalism, the moment when the Chinese people stood up to imperial powers, and the lead-in to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, down the road a ways, Qinghua and Beijing University professors hosted a commemoration in which they spoke of the movement as a time of opening the halls of learning to people of both genders and all classes, and of deepening public conversations about science and democracy. Since the 90th anniversary is just around the corner, we might be on the look-out for a similar split in commemorations.

Pankaj Mishra spoke of the current “9” year—2009—as a moment of geopolitical crisis for India. Many conversations of India being the 21st century superpower with the help of the U.S. had long overlooked India’s “big neighbor to the north,” but after the 2008 Beijing Olympics it has become evident that not only can China no longer be ignored, but she might in fact inherit the superpower crown. At the same time, the financial crisis is hitting India hard, and Obama has made it clear that his intentions are to use India as a political counterweight to Afghanistan and Pakistan, not to China.

The conversation touched upon many more scintillating issues, but the report shall end here for sake of a pretense of brevity.

May Fourth Movement: Top Five Readings

By Rana Mitter

The May Fourth Movement – so famous in China it doesn’t need a year, although 1919 – the year it happened – has become legendary too. On that date, some three thousand students marched through Beijing demonstrating against Japanese imperialism and started a political movement that would become identified with Chinese demands for “science” and “democracy” through the next century. From the Cultural Revolution to Tian’anmen Square, May Fourth echoes through China’s modern history. The Chinese Communist Party still claims the movement as its point of origin. On May 4, 2009, the movement will be ninety years old. In some ways, its significance to China is like that of the Sixties in the West – a celebration of youth and possibility combined with often extremist and hardcore politics.

But what was this event, why did it matter, and how can you find out more about it?

Here are five ways into this fascinating topic – famous in China, little-known in the West.

1. Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Viking Penguin 1981): still the classic account of the May Fourth generation and their revolution. Sweeping account that goes from the late Qing all the way to the end of the Cultural Revolution, with May Fourth intellectuals at its heart.

2. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman. Iconic short story by China’s major modern writer, written on the eve of the seminal events of May Fourth, 1919. Searing indictment of traditional Confucian society. Translations into English by Gladys Yang and William Lyell.

3. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (1986). This is a fine academic account of the movement and its consequences – not for the beginner, but very subtle.

4. Chen Duxiu, “Call to Youth.” Chen’s call to China’s youth to “save the nation” in 1919 symbolizes the May Fourth Movement’s attempt to overcome Confucian attempts to venerate age and instead celebrate youth.

5. “Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China,” Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, in Journal of Asian Studies (November 1990) – classic article on how the 1989 student protesters in China “acted out” their political protests with references to the past.

Rana Mitter is Professor of History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University and the author of works such as A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World and Modern China: A Very Short Introduction.

A Monster Mash(up) with Chinese Characteristics: Breaking News from the PRC for those Intrigued by the "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" Phenomenon

By the end of this post, readers will have been able to click on a word to be introduced to the sounds of "Redgrass Music" (a genre that uses Chinese instruments in a novel manner), seen the special look of a curious vehicle recently displayed in Shanghai that one journalist has said should be called a "Lexiac" ( like a Pontiac from the front, like a Lexus from behind), and discovered something important that Zhang Yimou and Jane Austen have in common (hint: surprise appearances by the undead are involved in each case). First, though, some background about "mash-ups" (aka "mash ups" and "mashups"), for "China Beat" has dealt with this subject before and even run pieces with mash-up-like titles, but never before confronted the phenomenon of contemporary mash-up mania head on.

The first point to stress is that mash-ups are not completely new by any means. Even if the term has a short history, the mixing and matching it suggests has been taking place in China as well as all sorts of other place for ages. Fusion food was already a big thing way back in the twentieth century. (And what were nineteenth-century creations like chop suey and chow mein if not a kind of culinary mash-up avant la lettre?) Artists have been bringing together elements from and playing with juxtapositions of features of different genres and even different media for centuries, even if it is only recently that such efforts have been called "mash-ups," "samplings," or "post-modern" efforts. Turning from cuisine and art to politics, China is one of many countries that has a long experience with approaches to ideology that involve striking juxtapositions of concepts and assumptions, with just two of many examples being the effort by the Taipings (1848-1864) to fuse aspects of Christian eschatology with various kinds of indigenous concepts and the current experiment with "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," which Nicholas Kristoff has dubbed "Market Leninism," a term that captures even more effectively the mash-up-like quality of the approach.

Still, one could certainly argue that, thanks partly to the ease with which new technologies allow for re-mixing and combining, there's something special about the current rage for various kinds of mash-ups. (Even though the literary one currently making news, which features Austen characters battling zombies could have been published before the days of computers; it could just not, as the creator has noted, been published before Pride and Prejudice went out of copyright and entered the public domain.) The mash-up has become so omnipresent that there's not just one entry for the term in Wikipedia, which likes the hyphen-less spelling of this sort of hybridity, but four separate ones, running the gamut from "Mashup (digital)" to "Mashup (web application hybrid)," with "Mashup (music)," aka "bootlegging," and "Mashup (video)," aka having fun with YouTube (a format that has introduced new audiences to such classics that of the genre that pre-date the coining of the M word as "Bambi Meets Godzilla"
and "Stairway to Gilligan's Island"), in between.

This said, I'll invite readers to figure out where exactly they fall on the spectrum that runs from the "there's nothing new under the sun" to "the coming of the web has changed everything" continuum where mix-and-match creations are concerned, and simply make what they will of these 5 mash-ups created within the PRC (the first two of which have ties to the Warcraft family of games, whose popularity in China we've dealt with before on this site, here and here:



1. Pride and Patriotism and Zombies (hat tip to Danwei)...

Not content to wait to see exactly how Zhang Yimou, who choreographed the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Games, handles the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, some Chinese students, who don't seem to have a satirical intent (but I'm not sure how one would know if they did) have come up with this version of that upcoming event (the real thing takes place October 1, 2009), substituting monstrous and mythical characters from Warcraft 3 (like those shown below) for the humans who will actually do the marching that day.

2. One World (of Warcraft), One Dream

In a similar vein, here, from the ChinaSmack site, is a monstrous mash-up, featuring World of Warcraft characters, which has fun with the song that was used to whip up excitement for the Beijing Games (note the original version of the song below it, which has Jackie Chan and other celebrities taking turns with the lyrics).


3. Redgrass Music (hat tip to James Millward of "The World on a String" blog, and Chris Hesselton for alerting me to the good post awaiting me there)...
The music speaks for itself if you click here.

4. Confucian Blues
Staying with music, there's a fascinating video of novelist/vocalist Liu Sola available here, originally broadcast on CCTV, which looks at her writings and includes clips of her on-stage experiments with fusing styles as dissimilar as Chinese Opera and American Blues.

5. Last and Maybe Least, the Lexiac...
Shown here with front and back views, of course...