Marx and the Taipings

With all the May anniversary dates to mark, we missed the May 5th birthday of Karl Marx (a man to whose thought the Chinese Communist Party still pays homage, even if you wouldn't know it from their economic policies). Had we been on our toes, we might have found a China-specific way to mark that date, like looking back to how Marx, in his journalist mode, wrote about the Taiping Uprising, an event that the CCP would later treat as a precedent for their own revolutionary struggle. Well, in the spirit of better late than never, here's what one of our past contributors, Daniel Little, had to say about just that subject on a blog of his own, in a piece that he's letting us repost in its entirety here...

By Daniel Little

It is interesting to observe how Europe's greatest revolutionary, Karl Marx (1818-1883), thought about China's greatest revolution in the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). We might imagine that this relentless advocate for underclass interests might have cheered for the poor peasants of the Taiping Heavenly Army. But this was not the case. Marx wrote about the Taiping Rebellion several times in the New York Daily Tribune and other newspapers, and his analysis and his sympathies are fascinating. His articles are as close to blog postings as one could get in the middle of the nineteenth century; they are topical, opinionated, and pretty revealing about his underlying assumptions.

The Taiping rebellion was enormous in every way: perhaps 20 million deaths, armies approaching a million soldiers, sustained Taiping control of large swatches of Chinese territory and cities, and an extended time duration of fighting (about fifteen years). The American civil war took place during roughly the same time period; and the Taiping rebellion was many times more destructive. It is a truly fascinating period of world history, and one that had important consequences in the twentieth century. (Mao and the Chinese Communists largely represented the Taiping rebellion as a proto-communist uprising.) So how did Marx respond to this social catastrophe? In a thumbnail -- his observations show a remarkable blindness to a contemporary historical event that seems tailor-made for the framework of his own theories of history and underclass politics.

In 1853 Marx wrote a piece for the Daily Tribune called "Revolution in China and in Europe" that encapsulates his own understanding of what the Taiping revolution was, and what brought it about. He lays the largest causal role on the effects of the Opium Wars a decade earlier. English cannons smashed the appearance of invincible power and authority of the Imperial Chinese state and imposed humiliating conditions on the Chinese nation. "Before the British arms the authority of the Manchu dynasty fell to pieces." And, simultaneously, trade and financial penetration by the European powers occurred in ways that were almost fatally deleterious to the Chinese economy and polity. Forced opium trade led to a rapid depletion of Chinese silver reserves; and the forced availability of English textiles led to severe dislocation for Chinese textile workers. "In China the spinners and weavers have suffered greatly under this foreign competition, and the community has become unsettled in proportion."

Nine years later Marx published another article on the Taiping rebellion, this time in the German newspaper, Die Presse. The article, "Chinese Affairs," begins with a pretty remarkable bit of Asiatic stereotyping:

Some time before the tables began to dance, China--this living fossil--started revolutionizing. By itself there was nothing extraordinary in this phenomenon, since the Oriental empires always show an unchanging social infra-structure coupled with unceasing change in the persons and tribes who manage to ascribe to themselves the political super-structure. (442)

In this piece he picks up a somewhat different theme from that of the earlier article. Here he offers an interpretation of the Taiping rebellion against the backdrop of Manchu colonialism: "Why should there not be initiated, after 300 years, a movement to overthrow it?" So the 1853 theory postulates the weakening of the Chinese social order as a chief cause, while the 1862 theory postulates a nationalistic motivation -- a desire of Han people to overthrow Manchu rule. (An irony here is that the Taiping movement emerged with key support from Hakka people, a cultural minority within the Han population.)

The interpretation that Marx offers for the occurrence of a vast rebellion in China, then, is largely an exogenous one: war, trade, and European intrusion led to a total disruption of China's social order; Manchu colonial rule created nationalistic unrest; and rebellion ensued.

Marx then goes on to a description of the nature of the rebellion and the rebels.

What is original in this Chinese revolution are only its bearers. They are not conscious of any task, except the change of dynasty. They have no slogans. They are an even greater scourge to the population than the old rulers. It seems that their vocation is nothing else than to set against the conservative disintegration of China, its destruction, in grotesque horrifying form, without any seeds for a renaissance. (443)

There are no agents in this description, no social program, and no agenda for change. Instead, there is only blind violence and destruction. Marx quotes with evident approval the dispatch of Mr. Bruce, the English Ambassador to Peking, who decries the violence and disorder of the Taiping armies. And Bruce's central observation is the violence and rapaciousness of the Taiping armies, stealing or destroying all property in the regions they controlled.

Notice what Marx's analysis does not do. It does not identify the class nature of the Taiping movement. It does not ask what were the social causes that led Chinese peasants to follow the Taiping armies. And it does not ask what was the social program of the Taiping movement. The Taipings are represented as a cipher -- just an irrational uprising of millions of passive followers.

So whatever happened to the tools of historical analysis that Marx recommended -- the forces and relations of production, the concrete circumstances of class relations, the intimate connection between material conditions of life and political behavior, and the emphasis on exploitation and rebellion? Why was Marx not disposed to ask the basic questions about the Chinese case: who are these people? What are the social relations from which they emerge? And what are they attempting to bring about in their rebellion? Why, in short, didn't we get something more akin to The Civil War in France , with an effort at a detailed social and political analysis of the uprising?

It is hard to escape the answer to this question: it is Eurocentrism in the extreme, and a consequent inability to see the implications of his own categories of analysis for this otherwise intriguing case. This isn't exactly news, of course. But it does underline the importance for today's historians of finding ways of treating world history without imposing the categories of European experience. A China-centered analysis of the Taiping rebellion has a very different look from the sketch we find in Marx's descriptions. (See an earlier posting on historical comparisons for more on this point.)

There is a great deal of very good contemporary historical research on the Taiping rebellion. Here are a handful of good contemporary treatments:

Cole, James H. 1981. The People Versus the Taipings: Bao Lisheng's Righteous Army of Dongan. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California.
Kuhn, Philip A. 1970. Rebellion and its enemies in late imperial China, militarization and social structure, 1796-1864, Harvard East Asian series, 49. Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard University Press.
Kuhn, Philip A. 1977. Origins of the Taiping Vision: Cross-cultural Dimensions of a Chinese Rebellion. Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (3):350-66.
———. 1978. The Taiping Rebellion. In The Cambridge History of China v. 10, edited by D. Twitchett and J. K. Fairbank.
Spence, Jonathan D. 1996. God's Chinese son: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: W.W. Norton.
Wagner, Rudolf G. 1982. Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, Univ. of Calif.

These histories bring out many different aspects of the Taiping story, and they don't all agree. They also bring out an element that is entirely missing in Marx's comments -- the influence of Christian missionaries on the formation of Taiping ideology. But what they all agree on is that the Taiping movement was socially complex, with a strong ideology, a very specific set of demands about property and social institutions, and pretty complex military relations. And they certainly agree that the relationship between Manchu rule, European colonialism, and internal social factors is far more complex than Marx's story allows.

Both articles discussed here (as well as a large number of postings on India) are included in Karl Marx on Colonialism & Modernization: His Despatches And Other Writings on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, a volume edited and introduced by Shlomo Avineri.

5/16/89: To Serve the People

This piece is excerpted from the manuscript of Philip J. Cunningham’s forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham's book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

By Philip J. Cunningham

The term “democracy” was gaining a certain purchase on the popular imagination, though it was not without its slippery side. Given the predictable confusion about what the students were really up to, given the abstraction and ambiguity inherent in political term minzhu, particularly within the confines of a communist society which fancied itself to be democratic in a roundabout sort of way, “democracy” meant very different things to different people. It had such a bafflingly wide range of meaning, it was so easily co-opted and distorted, that one could better appreciate the efficacy of a banal but concrete cry.

Thus “support the students” became one of those rare phrases, polished and spit out by the crowd, that a million voices could safely agree to say in unison.

SUPPORT THE STUDENTS!

The frictionless interactions I was enjoying with Bright, Jenny, Lily and other friends from Shida also bolstered my confidence, my sense of being part of a giant, magnificent sort of drama that had a role for everyone and anyone willing to step up on stage.

The spirit of the day permitted ample interaction of the sort I liked best. Not above, not below, just side by side with everyone else. No big fuss about obvious differences, nor any need to elaborate obvious commonalities, just people getting along. All afternoon I moved through the congregation feeling very much a person, and not much a laowai.
…

It was long after lunch hour but the kitchen staff continued to stand stoically on the grease splattered cement, tending boiling huge vats of broth, kneading dough and ladling out portions to impatient eaters, restoring the flagging spirits of tired protesters and nurturing the dehydrated bodies of sun-exposed men and women weary of foot. Cooks, cashiers and cleaners who toiled in low-rent, ramshackle shops such as this had no illusions about their social status. They were among the losers in Deng’s new hybrid system of socialism mixed with capitalism.

Such work wasn’t entrepreneurial, with all possible risks and benefits that entailed, but it was not much of a socialist sinecure either. They worked long hours for low pay in a job both physically demanding and accident-prone. Deng Xiaoping famously said to get rich is glorious but that was for other people, special people. The workers in the “iron rice bowl” trades could at best look forward to sipping tea and reading newspapers in between shifts, a life of low productivity punctuated by long stretches of boredom.

But the Wonton Place met the needs of cash-starved, dialect-shouting rural pilgrims visiting the capital, diners who might only dream about eating in Quan Ju De, where duck was served up according to social class, with VIP rooms for wining and dining foreign dignitaries such as Kim Il Sung, along with less efficiently air-conditioned rooms for local hotshots and, as a gesture to the hoi polloi, a fast food style canteen on the ground level where the tables, and floor, were never free of cigarette butts, discarded bones and duck bits.

Here, in contrast, the menu was simple and there was but one class of service; deliveries were made by bicycle and the coal-fired kitchen hummed along with a hardy functionality, so low-tech it could operate at full blast even during a black-out.

A worker in a food-stained white uniform takes a break from infernal heat of the kitchen, stepping outside to wipe her brow, then briefly survey the insatiable army that she was helping to feed. Transfixed by the enormity of the crowd assembling on the square, her eyes brightened with pride and amazement, as if it had just dawned on her that even she had a part to play in much the unfolding drama.


The words, “It is important for people like that to be here” came to mind. The neglected wageworker, who made a bare-bones living by slopping out soupy servings to day tourists on the edge of a plaza that memorialized revolutions past, was she not also an inheritor of the revolutionary tradition? The sudden upsurge in the spirit to “serve the people” was transformational.

The men and women in their soiled aprons were working class heroes, playing an appreciated role, feeding pass-by revolutionaries and slaking the thirst of the throng.

I had seen a similar transformation of kitchen crew and menial workers on campus, even the sassy rural attendants in the Insider Guest House, who, far from being critical of the students, were proud to be proximate to history in the making. The nervy defiance of the students, however opaque and abstract their goals might be in political terms, was seductive to bored ordinary folk, for it offered both spectacle and a hint of better things to come. Egalitarianism and self-sacrifice were back in circulation with a vengeance after a decade that saw socialist values eroded by a get-rich-quick mentality.

Bright finds me and hurries over just in time to help me carry our bowls of hot soup while Jenny looks for a seat. We thank the kitchen staff for the food they ladle out, and we are not alone in doing so, others too, express admiration for the way the kitchen crew efficiently filled so many hungry stomachs.

By a stroke of luck, two seats opened up just as we had resigned ourselves to eating on our feet. There was no table, but two sturdy stools were available along the railing on the edge of the earthen promontory. We swiftly took possession of the coveted seats, taking turns to rest our legs and greedily slurping down hot soup in full view of the Square.

The outdoor eating area of the Wonton Place was like a rough-hewn balcony, offering a rare unobstructed view of the drum flat plaza in front of us. Beyond the railing and a mass of entangled bicycles, a pent-up political procession unscrolled before our eyes.

Given the elevation of our humble perch, we could see not only the south to north pattern of flow of the demonstrators treading closest to us, but detect an equal and opposite movement clear across the Square where the other side of the human cyclone moved north to south.

We gobbled up the dumplings and savored the hot broth to the last drop. I was proud to have been a tiny cog in that giant rotating human clockwork out there but at the same time it was a relief to be a more or less autonomous individual again, a few paces apart from the hypnotic beat of other footsteps.

I needed space and distance to order my thoughts, a quiet timeout to jot down some notes. For some reason I found it hard to think in the midst of the crowd, it was as if some ancient communal subconscious ruled when I was walled in on all sides by thick human traffic; it was hard to reflect with any clarity from the inside out. But then again, I would not have much to reflect on afterwards, from the sidelines, had I not first lost myself on the inside. To me the two emerging sweet spots in a rotating vortex of protesters pushing a million were to be either in the center of the crowd or on its outer edge. There was a crunching intensity in one view, an aloof clarity in the other. The two poles were buffered by an in-between zone of halfhearted student agitators and partially politicized townspeople.

BBC's tussle with militant onlookers last night had been in just such an ill-defined location; tellingly it had taken place at a time of day when fears about a nocturnal crackdown were mounting.

This morning I had seen little such volatility or even the everyday tensions I normally associated with tight knots of people on the street, where loud arguments, even shoving matches and fist fights routinely took place in full public view. It was not so much ironclad discipline that enabled the crowd out there to enjoy such an unusual degree of freedom from untoward incident or petty fights, rather it was a kind of mass elation combined with a collapse of individual boundaries; the mass somehow pulled itself together and sedated itself.

Several times I tried taking pictures of the kinetic marching with my fixed lens Olympus, but only a wide-angle could do the broad panorama real justice, and even then, the result would be too static to convey the constant motion. I settled for a series of snaps in succession, thinking I might be able to fit them together like pieces of a puzzle later.

The spectacle of so many people in constant motion was so mesmerizing, the effect of delicious noodles and a warm beer on empty stomachs so soporific, that we lingered in our ringside seats overlooking the Square even after lunch hour ended. Eyes locked in a hundred yard stare, body immobile with fatigue and slightly off balance from a touch of inebriation, I felt myself being tugged and transported back into the thick of it without lifting a finger. I was overwhelmed with a sense of awe and an ecstatic sense of well-being to see so many people moving together with so much spirit and so little friction. The Square had become a font of revolutionary renewal tempered, mercifully, by an all-encompassing harmony.

The marchers at Tiananmen moved to the drumbeat of the Chinese language hypnotically, almost in unison. Did the rhythmic repetition of slogans have a mantra-like calming effect? Or was it the simple unalloyed delight of the warm spring breeze that blew under the embrace of a blue sky? Or was it perhaps the cool, silvery light of a moon on the rise, daring to follow in the trail of the scorching sun. There was a communal joy in being part of something so much bigger than oneself, but there was also a rare assertion of self, the realization of a long-suppressed need to take the helm of one's life.

I crouched forward and leaned on the railing, the warm restorative broth and warm beer having some effect, not to mention the delayed onset of drowsiness from a sleepless night on the Square.

Although many of the things going on right before my eyes eluded easy intellectual comprehension, I was moved by the spirit of the day. It was thrilling to be in a nation waking up to a new dawn, it was empowering to witness the empowerment of the downtrodden. Something important was going on, touching all levels of society and I wanted to be close to the beating heart of it.

RSS Feeds

Several regular readers have mentioned in conversations recently that they don’t know what an “RSS feed” is. Many of our readers are already using the service—at this writing, more than 1200 of them access the site’s content this way.

What is an RSS feed? “RSS” stands for “really simple syndication” or maybe “rich site summary” (depending on who you ask). An RSS reader is a service that will automatically download content from websites of your choosing. Rather than spending time each day checking in at each of the websites you regularly read, your reader will download all the new content from these sites and put it in one place for you to scroll through. In effect, you are “subscribing” to each of the websites you select for your (personalized) reader. You can find further basic explanation of RSS at Wikipedia or an even less technical guide here and a very simple video explanation here.

There are many sites you can use as an RSS feed, though CB is most familiar with Google Reader, and that is a good place to start if you already have a Google/Gmail account. 

Zhao's Memoirs: 5 Places to Turn

The biggest publishing news just now related to Tiananmen's 20th anniversary is the release of Zhao Ziyang's memoirs, a book that was apparently already being offered for sale in Hong Kong even before its official publication date and has been reviewed, excerpted, and discussed in various newspapers and magazines.  We may at some point do an "In Case You Missed It" review of Prisoner of the State (or deal with it extensively in another fashion), but we weren't able to do a "Coming Distractions" piece about it for a simple reason: we weren't sent an advance copy.* 

What we can do at this point is offer up a top 5 list, which directs readers to some of the most interesting things that others have been saying about the book, based either on reading it or in some cases simply ruminating on its appearance and how reports related to it have been making their way into or been kept out of China. Here are five things worth reading:

1. This blog post by Evan Osnos reflecting on the fact that this isn't the first time that efforts by the Chinese authorities to keep someone silent have failed, even if in the case of this book it is appearing posthumously.

2. This smart piece by Geoff Dyer and Jamil Anderlini of the Financial Times that sums up many key points about Zhao and the book and includes some telling quotes.

3. Peking Duck on the ability, at least for a time, for Internet users in the PRC to access excerpts from the book in audio form, with an allusion to the role of tweets in spreading word of this possibility. Or go to Jeremy Goldkorn's post on this same phenomenon as evidence that "China's Net Nanny moves in mysterious ways," a good line.

4. Speaking of turns of phrase, Perry Link's Washington Post review of Zhao's memoir ends with a striking one. In trying to capture the complexities of a situation in which there is often great discontent and yet the government stays in power, he writes that: "The seal continues to straddle the ball -- insecure as ever, but still definitely on top." (This sort of zoological analogy for a political situation may remind regular readers of Link's best known New York Review of Books commentaries, which was about the complex workings of censorship and self-censorship and was called "China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier.")

5. China Digital Times with a typically good set of excerpts from reviews and other coverage.

* Note to any publishers, authors, or agents who follow this blog: feel free to send advance copies of works that might interest our readers to China Beat c/o History Department, 200 Krieger Hall, University of California-Irvine, as they might end up the focus of a "Coming Distractions" post.

5/15/89: Looking for Gorbachev

This piece is excerpted from Philip J. Cunningham’s manuscript of his forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham's book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

By Philip J. Cunningham

Setting up a shot in a methodical manner--tripods incrementally adjusted, white balance achieved, illumination enhanced--allowed for the recording of clean, well-lit images worthy of prime time TV, but much of it came at the price of spontaneity. That which we sought to observe was constantly reacting to us and regrouping due to our presence. Cameramen know all about this of course, and a long lens can, with some foreshortening, capture unadulterated spontaneity, but more than once we simply scrapped the shot when members of the crowd seized up or returned our curiosity in an obvious way.

Which brought us back full circle to the solipsism of the TV standup; one of the few tasks we could do convincingly was a phony setup in which one member of our crew talked to the red light of the camera hoping to simulate an intimate conversation with unseen viewers in faraway land in the not too distant future.

It was hard to get away from the feeling that television news was at least as much about “television” as it was about “news.” The starving students and their rowdy supporters on Tiananmen Square were, for our current purposes, but a colorful backdrop; BBC wanted to shine light on one of its own. But even that proved an elusive task.

To get the angle necessary to see both the correspondent and the crowd, and, if humanly possible, Mao’s distant portrait floating somewhere in the foggy night air, we had to find some way to put the solidly built, silver-haired John Simpson head and shoulders above everyone else. But a plaza as wide and unadorned as Tiananmen Square offers few natural promontories other than the monument, which was already staked out by students and at this juncture off-limits to the crew.

After Eric, the cameraman, made it clear he needed something, anything, to elevate the correspondent, I procured, at length, two flatbed bicycle carts to serve as platforms, one for the correspondent, one for the cameraman.

The cameraman signaled he was ready to roll, which was John Simpson’s cue to mount the flatbed cart and commence his standup. He squeezed past curious spectators in a reasonably dignified manner, but he had to step out of the dignity of his persona in order to clamber up on the cart, one knee at a time, and rise, tentatively and awkwardly, to a standing position on the top of the slightly wobbly cart.

Eric was perched atop the other bicycle cart, which he and his soundman Fred had expertly aligned with John Simpson’s temporary pedestal to obtain optimal background visuals, effective depth of field and a precise focal length for the standup shot. Yet even they, despite their workaday clothing and self-effacing work style, created through their silent labors enough commotion to draw a circle of onlookers.

As eager onlookers inched forward to see what was going on, they pressed against one cart or the other. Even the slightest wobble or shift in position caused the shot to fall out of alignment, ruining the setup, creating a new delay.

Fred, curly blond hair sprouting every which way from the black frames of his glasses and big black headphones, attended to technical difficulties in his usual calm and unruffled way, expertly handling both sound and illumination, while trying to detect the source of the trouble. He adjusted the lights, hoisting the sound boom in place while Eric and I tried to re-align the carts. The “talent” remained aloft, only slightly ruffled from two near-miss tumbles, his shiny, neatly groomed hair now mussed up from the effects of a light breeze.


Simpson did what any conscientious television anchor or on-air reporter would do, which was to focus on making himself as presentable as possible while silently practicing his lines for the unforgiving eye of his intended audience in television land, but in doing so, he made himself look, to his unintended local audience at least, like a madman on a soapbox.

The correspondent got about halfway through his stentorian address to an unseen audience when peals of laughter ruined the sound and a shake of the cart ruined the shot. Eric called “cut” and requested another take. Again the cart was bumped or shaken, again it was hard to keep the spectators quiet. What was an imperceptible movement to the rest of us, Eric saw magnified through the shaking viewfinder and concluded to be intentional sabotage. He made a grimace, turned off the camera, pleaded with me to address the onlookers, to demand that everyone be still.

Wary of issuing orders with no authority, at an illegal gathering where, to put it lightly, the forces of law and order were neither in view nor on our side, I super-politely requested those around me for their cooperation. Satisfied, Eric gave the correspondent the signal to start over again.

On the third take, a young Chinese man, perhaps inspired by sight of foreign journalists taping what appeared to be an important speech, lifted his own tape recorder, a cheap cassette player, high over his head, his outstretched arm mimicking Fred’s boom mike, shoving the tape recorder right in front of the important white man to better capture his important, if indecipherable, words.

“Cut!”

The subsequent take was also ruined, this time by a comically aggressive onlooker who was straining to smile for the camera. The take after that was nixed by the soundman, as two of the standers-by next to him started a loud, animated conversation the minute the lights went on.

Seeing the exasperated faces of the BBC crew, I formally addressed the crush of bodies around us, hoping to win some cooperation. In response I was told that we foreigners were offending the dignity of the Chinese people due to our arrogance.

“Tongzhimen…Comrades,” I said out of textbook habit, then softened it to reflect changing times.

“Peng-you-men. Friends. Please help us here tonight,” I offered, desperately trying to strike the right tone. “We are making a news report for BBC English television. Would it be possible for everyone to be quiet and still for just a minute?"

"We can talk if we want to!" A voice shot out from the back.

"Of course you can,” I sallied back. “But please, talk quietly."

"This is China!" he said indignantly. "You're foreigners."

Because this xenophobic line of thought, with its unhappy echoes of foiled past encounters truly irritated me, I turned my back on the man, which riled him up all the more.

"I demand that you translate everything the “old Whitey” is saying," a man in a cheap Mao jacket said, giving us the look-over with a jaundiced eye. "Otherwise we, that is, we Chinese, we will not cooperate!"

"Hey listen, friend.” I said sarcastically, my patience straining. “I will translate for you, but after we are finished filming, okay?"

"We demand you tell us now!" he shouted, rallying for support.

"Where are you from?" asked another young man.

"It will only take a few minutes and then we will have lots of time to talk," I promised. "Okay?"

"Foreigners!" a new voice rang out.

"Look at old Whitey up on the cart!" shouted another, followed by a caustic laugh.

With at least a hundred people now pressing in on us in a deeply congested corner of a plaza containing, all told, over a hundred thousand demonstrators, we were vulnerable, at the complete mercy of the illegal assembly.

…

"Today a crowd gathers in peaceful protest at Tian-an…” Simpson started. “Hello! Hey, --who’s shaking the cart?" After almost getting knocked over by a particularly violent thrust, Simpson regained his balance but not his composure.

The deliberate thrust against our man felt like an attack on all of us. "Who did that?" I asked sternly, studying the faces closest to the cart. My interrogative glance was met with indignant protestations of innocence, sullen stares, and a few weak smiles.

"What is your relationship with the foreigners?" I overheard someone quizzing the bicycle cart drivers. The vigilante-style interrogation that followed left both drivers looking shaken and worried. One driver approached me sheepishly, saying he’d like to get his cart back. I indicated I understood. The other driver sportingly agreed to wait, and even went so far as to ask the trouble-makers for their cooperation. He did so in a culturally sensitive way, asking his fellow citizens to quiet down so that the laowai would get done already and he could go home to eat, but it didn’t placate everyone.

"Oh, you're a fine one, telling us to shut-up because you are in the pay of the foreigners," challenged a young man with an unruly mop of hair.

"That’s it,” chimed another. “How much are the laowai paying you?"

"How much, traitor? That's what we want to know!" another unfriendly voice cried out.

The almost magical, all-encompassing harmony I had experienced moving amidst the student-dominated crowd in the past two days had evaporated, causing me to wonder how much of the harmony had been in my mind.

…

"So, how much is the foreign boss paying?” shouted a threatening voice.

“Yes! How much? How much?" echoed several others.

Oblivious to the content of the arguments storming around them but hyper-sensitive to vibrations as perceived through the lens and microphone, the crew gamely tried to accelerate the shoot, attempting to race through the short standup while I worked the crowd. At last, Eric, who struck me as being a most sensible and patient man, started cursing under his breath.

"Phil," he whispered, "There's someone doing it on purpose. They wait until the lights are on and then they deliberately shake the cart. Can you find out who it is?"

I carefully watched both carts, but honestly couldn’t pin down the culprit. As it was, I was hearing pre-emptive pleas of innocence.

"It wasn't me. Nope, wasn't me. Wasn't me either."

It was on the ninth or tenth take that I heard a shockingly stupid rumor going around. The distinguished-looking Caucasian man up on the cart was said to be a famous politician. A really famous one.

"That's Gor-ba-chev!" a voice cried out, as if in confirmation. "Look, they're interviewing the leader of the Soviet Union!" A momentary hush was followed by a wave of excited murmurs and a forward thrust of onlookers. Then there was a sudden, total breakdown in order as the Soviet leader’s name was chanted in Chinese.

"Ge-er-ba-qiao-fu! Ge-er-ba-qiao-fu! Ge-er-ba-qiao-fu!”

Something hit the cart hard, knocking John Simpson off balance. He broke his fall with an outstretched arm, tumbling safely into the arms of the crew. Pale and shaken, he tried to regain his sangfroid by batting the dust off his jacket. "Can someone tell me what is going on?"

I didn’t want to say that the rumor of the Soviet leader appearing on the Square to mix with Chinese protesters was a positively explosive development, plus Simpson wouldn’t understand how he could possibly be confused with another white man who looked so different from him, so I let it go.

The rhythmic incantation about Gorbachev, though apparently incomprehensible to the crew, was alarming enough that they knew it was time to beat a quick exit. I emptied my pocket, handing each of the drivers a wad of small bills, crisp FEC notes mixed with wrinkled renminbi.

"Are you trying to buy us Chinese with your foreign money?" an eagle-eyed spokesman for the masses asked maliciously. "Foreigners! Imperialists. Ha!"

The drivers, now completely intimidated, refused all money, hastily mounted their bikes and slid away into the darkness, begging cooperation as they pedaled against the inward push of the throng. It was terrifying to realize that just a handful of malicious hangers-on could put so many decent people in jeopardy. At a time of uncertain political outcome such as this, it didn’t take much to manipulate the mood of listless bystanders, and I despaired to see how a small misunderstanding could trump the overall mood of solidarity.

"You see that? The arrogant foreigners used the cart," one of the more devious troublemakers said in accusatory tone, after scaring the drivers away. "And didn't even pay!"

"They are taking advantage of the Chinese people!" yelled his co-conspirator.

"Who the hell are you?" I shot back in rude Chinese. By now I had had it. I didn't want to fight, but gambled that a strong response might get the wise guys off our backs and stop the conflict from escalating. We were surrounded, so if the crush got any more hostile, it might be hard to extract ourselves without a bloody fight.

"Don't you dare talk to me like that," the man steamed angrily. "This is China!"

"China? China has nothing to do with it," I shouted back. “The problem is you. What kind of thing are you?"

I had really lost my cool, and it was wrong to use such a coarse expression, even though I heard Chinese use it among themselves. The situation had deteriorated in a way that needed no translation. The BBC crew wasted no time in packing up and packing off while I tried to hold my ground in an intemperate verbal exchange.

Just as my crew was on the verge of extracting themselves from the scene, a middle-aged man with a thin beard came up to me, effectively blocking my exit. He spoke fluent, educated English with a soft American accent.

"You should not have talked to that man like that!" he chided me.

"He shouldn't have made so much trouble for us!" I answered in Chinese. "Who does he think he is?" And who do you think you are, I might have asked.

"Your Chinese is very good, but you must be careful," the soft-spoken man said, continuing to speak in impeccable English. "This is a very special night for the Chinese people."

"What do you mean? That guy was bothering us.”

"It is very important that people like him be here," he said. "They may seem rude to you, but they support the students. It is especially dangerous for common Chinese to be here."

Who deemed it important for the "common people" to be here tonight? The man passed for what in China is called a “knowledgeable element” or intellectual. He was clearly educated, confident, and had something of a superior air.

Who was he? He reminded me of Zhu Jiaming, a Zhao protégé I had met at the University of Michigan, and was not unlike other brilliant young intellectuals in government think tanks such as the Academy of Social Sciences, many of whom had studied on American campuses. Was he one of those reformist intellectuals working behind the scenes for Zhao Ziyang?

"And if I may, just what unit are you with?" I asked in Chinese, to the apparent delight of a few in the now momentarily subdued mob who had been straining to understand the exchange in English. The soft-spoken man had a definable presence, an unassailable font of self-assurance, almost a cockiness that reminded me of film director Chen Kaige. His erudition and elitist élan could not be completely disguised by his untended facial hair or his baggy trousers and plain shirt.

"Never you mind that," he said dismissively, steering the conversation back into English, "But I know your country, I did research at the University of Chicago."

"Why are you talking to me in English?"

"I don't want them to understand."

"So where do you work?"

"The Academy of Sciences," he said. "And you? Tell me about yourself."

"Well, we're from BBC," I said, turning only to discover that my colleagues were out of sight. It was my responsibility to get them back to the Great Wall Hotel, after which we could safely commiserate about the dangers of the mob over cold beer in the lobby bar.

A familiar feeling swept over me, pulling me two ways at once. I wanted to talk more to this enigmatic man who had been observing us and the people’s reaction to us with insight and attention.

But I had agreed to take the crew to the Square and worried, probably unnecessarily given their finely-honed vocational resourcefulness, about them finding their back to the hotel without a word of Chinese between them, so I pulled myself away.

"It’s interesting talking to you,” I told the self-possessed intellectual. “And I’d love to chat more, but I gotta catch up with the crew. See ya."

On the way back, I explained to the crew that John Simpson had been mistaken for Gorbachev, and we all got a good laugh out of an otherwise harrowing experience. If our ace reporter had been frustrated by the failure to do a proper standup, or if his ego had in any way been bruised by the public humiliation of being forced off the cart, at least he could console himself with the thought that he had been mistaken for a great man.

In Case You Missed It: Death by a Thousand Cuts

By David Porter

Review of Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts, Harvard University Press, 2008. $29.95

In the months leading up to the Beijing games, as Tibet protests flared and t-shirts derided the “Genocide Olympics,” Jill Savitt, the Executive Director of the human rights group Dream for Darfur deployed a striking phrase in a New York Times interview about her group’s plans to pressure Beijing to take action on Sudan. Promising a broad-based campaign that would be far more sophisticated than a mere “ham-fisted boycott,” she explained, “From start to finish, what we want China to fear is death by a thousand cuts.”

In a coincidence tinged with historical irony, an important book published in the same month as this article began with the observation that the form of capital punishment known in China as “lingchi” and in English as “death by slicing” or “death by a thousand cuts” has served the Western imagination for over a century as a vivid emblem of Chinese barbarism. Read in this context, Savitt’s comment, by implicitly linking a notorious penal practice with atrocities in Darfur, reminds us of the continuing power of collective images of “feudal” China to inform current discussions of global politics, and suggests that much of the current passion concerning the human rights situation in China may have roots in a century-old preoccupation with peculiarly Chinese expressions of state power.

Arising out of a symposium on the comparative history of torture, Death by a Thousand Cuts offers a rich, wide-ranging examination of the histories of both the actual practice of lingchi and of the resonances of this and other forms of (often fantastical) punishments in the Chinese and Western imaginations. In some ways, the story is considerably more banal than one might expect: lingchi was used relatively rarely, and when it was, death was brought on quickly with a stab to the heart; the remaining cuts being mostly for show. In others, it poses unexpected challenges to the familiar pieties that are the continuing legacy of Western visitors’ descriptions of late Qing society. Like footbinding, the historical spectacle of lingchi has reassured generations of European and American observers of the comparative decency and humaneness of their own social practices. The flattering stories we tell ourselves, however, may merit additional scrutiny when they turn out, as the authors argue in the case of lingchi, to have been constructed for this purpose.

The book begins with a graphic account of the public execution of a prisoner condemned in 1904 for the murder of twelve members of a family with whom he had been involved in a property dispute. The event was notable both for being one of the last uses of lingchi—the punishment was abolished in 1905—and for being one of the first recorded by an amateur photographer. The coincidence was crucial in the consolidation of a powerful trope in the Western “understanding” of China. “By preserving images of cruel punishments from the last execution season of the old penal regime, European photographers preserved the gap between Chinese and European penal practices that the Qing state was about to close, making these shocking deaths a permanent memorial of cultural difference.” The crucial point here, as the authors demonstrate, is that an awareness of cultural difference did not so much arise out of the observation of lingchi as require and compulsively feed upon this observation to sustain a belief in essential, irreducible alterity. At times, this belief has taken the form of judgments that Chinese culture breeds an unusual capacity for (and insensibility to) bodily cruelty, but it has also informed, one might argue, the continuing insistence on depicting it as fundamentally lacking in qualities (democracy, human rights, rule of law) deemed necessary to civilized society.

A first step in complicating narratives of essential difference is to demonstrate deeply rooted similarities. Turning to the annals of European history, for example, the authors point out that the abolition of cruel and unusual punishments was a relatively recent development, and that it has only been through the convenient forgetting of this history that Western observers were able to make of tormented execution an icon of Chinese inhumanity and a proof of the cultural superiority of the West. The number of crimes warranting capital punishment seems also to have been comparable: the Ming legal code lists 241 capital offenses; as late as 1819, English law had 223. In the light of recent debates on Bush-era interrogation practices, it is interesting to read that “Chinese and European courts shared a concern to limit the use of judicial torture,” and that Chinese magistrates frequently warned of the unreliability of evidence given under torture. Various forms of sanctioned violence, it is clear, have played a role in the formation of every state; sensationalizing certain instances while downplaying others can only distort historical understanding.

Given the high instrumental value of essentializing narratives, they are unlikely to be dislodged, however, by the mere counter-assertion of parallels and congruencies. The authors rightly devote the bulk of their efforts to the more promising strategy of demythologizing lingchi by tracing, in painstaking detail, its historical evolution as both practice and symbol. Several chapters, then, offer careful studies of the recourse to capital punishment in the Chinese legal code, key portions of which remained in place from the late sixth century through the early twentieth. The most common crimes resulting in the death penalty in the late imperial period were murder, robbery, official malfeasance, and failure of military duty; the most serious crimes were those that threatened the dynasty, the emperor or the state, followed closely by those attacking the authority of parents, elders, husbands, officials, and teachers. From its earliest recorded uses in the Song period, the penalty of lingchi—the rarest of several recognized methods of execution—was closely regulated and authorized only in extraordinary circumstances. Its use in the Song, in fact, was viewed by both contemporaries and subsequent generations of legal scholars as a sign of moral regression, as the death penalty had been abolished altogether by the Tang in 747 (a thousand years before its abolition was proposed in Europe).

The symbolic valences of lingchi are perhaps the most compelling—and challenging—aspects of its history. The ethical significance of the punishment seems to have attached less to the physical pain involved (the coup de grace was typically administered on the third cut) than the dismemberment and exposure of the corpse. To desecrate an individual’s body was ritually to destroy his entire family as well as the continuity between this life and the next. The imaginative resonances of this destruction are explored in a fascinating chapter on representations of the Buddhist underworld, which graphically depicted atrocities that vastly exceeded punishments authorized under the Qing code. Similar imaginative elaborations characterize the history of Western accounts of Chinese punishments explored in the following chapters. The authors trace the origins of stereotypes of Chinese judicial cruelty back to the sixteenth century, demonstrating how they were subsequently refracted through Enlightenment notions of Oriental despotism, colonialist historiography, missionary tracts, and the ruminations of Georges Bataille to create an idée fixe as essential to European self-knowledge as the liberal ideals of Locke or Mill.

Any book by three authors is bound to show a few seams, and there are discontinuities and repetitions among some of the chapters that are occasionally distracting. But on the whole, the argument presented in these chapters and buttressed by thorough and wide-ranging historical scholarship, is as focused as it is forceful. Death by a Thousand Cuts will stand as a significant contribution both to East-West comparative history and to the critical interrogation of those intricate legacies of Orientalism that make it so hard to do well.

Journal of Asian Studies 68.2

In the brand new May 2009 issue, just up on the Cambridge University Press website, readers will find, free for now at least, two relatively short (four to six-thousand words) pieces in the Journal of Asian Studies' new "Asia Beyond the Headlines" series--one by Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan is on China-India comparisons, while the other is a take by USC political scientist Stanley Rosen (who took part in the Brookings Institution panel that was the subject of a recent post by Teresa Wright) on youth and politics in China.

The third piece is a full-length one (with illustrations) on Confucian temples by University of Wisconsin art historian Julia Murray (a contributor to China in 2008) who deals with the past and also the present (the cover of the issue shows an image from her illustrated piece). Here's the link (once there, each is a click away to read in HTML or as PDFs).

The Chinese Typewriter

Tom Mullaney, who will be familiar to regular followers of this site thanks to the podcasts he's done for us (such as this one on the 1989 protests and this one on Last Days of Old Beijing), recently mentioned that he is currently writing a history of the Chinese typewriter, as actual and imagined object.

He sent this piece introducing the subject, which moves between popular culture and the history of technology (how often are rapper MC Hammer, IBM engineers, diplomats from China, and Homer Simpson alluded to in a single story?), while illuminating some of the directions that thinking about the challenges involved in creating machines capable of reproducing Chinese characters have led:


By Thomas S. Mullaney

Propelled to international stardom by his multi-platinum single “U Can’t Touch This,” MC Hammer is perhaps not the first person one thinks of when studying Western stereotypes about China. Remarkably, however, the music video accompanying his 1990 hit featured one bit of fancy footwork that has helped perpetuate a distorted view of China dating back more than one hundred years. Known as the “Chinese typewriter,” the dance features MC Hammer side-stepping in rapid, frenetic movements, choreography that would gain immense popularity to become one of the defining dances of the early nineties.

Why the Chinese Typewriter? Hammer’s dance, the idea went, was supposed to mimic the alien virtuosity of a Chinese typist as he navigates what Hammer assumed must be an absurdly massive keyboard crowded with tens of thousands of characters.

Whereas the Oakland-born artist may be credited with bringing parachute pants into mainstream culture, the same cannot be said of his ideas regarding our Pacific neighbor. The Chinese typewriter has been an object of ridicule in the West since its inception at the turn of the century.

For over a hundred years, writers in the United States and Europe have derived a unique sense of cultural and technological superiority by portraying the apparatus as absurdly large, painfully slow, and prohibitively complex.

Others have simply assumed that the machine never existed—that it is a mechanical impossibility, and thus, that China is incapable of reaching a level of modernity equal to the West for the simple reason that Chinese characters are inherently incompatible with modern technology.

Contrary to media representations, however, the past century has witnessed the development of nearly five dozen different models of Chinese typewriter, each one representing an ever more sophisticated attempt at solving a puzzle that makes the more familiar QWERTY typewriter look like child’s play: the puzzle of how to fit a non-alphabetic language containing tens of thousands of characters on an apparatus of a manageable size and a user-friendly design. Despite the complexity of this challenge and the brilliance of the solutions devised, it seems that the West has remained incapable of taking the Chinese typewriter seriously.

Two of the earliest known Chinese typewriters were designed around the turn of the century, one by a Chinese man living in the United States and the other by an American man living in China.

The first of these was operated in San Francisco Chinatown, and was based on a variation of the longstanding practice of Chinese typesetting. Encompassing roughly five thousand of the language’s most frequently used characters, the machine incorporated a large, flat tray upon which metal typeface were arranged in accordance with a categorization system found in Chinese dictionaries of the day.

The second machine was invented by the Presbyterian missionary Devello Sheffield, whose machine also contained roughly five thousand characters. One of the only differences, and a minor one at that, was that Sheffield’s machine was based on a circular rather than rectangular configuration.

Despite the essential similarity of these two early designs, journalists reserved praise for the Westerner’s machine and scorn for that of his Chinese counterpart. Sheffield’s device was hailed as “remarkable,” “ingenious,” and the “most complicated and wonderful typewriter in the world,” while the machine in California was viciously lampooned by the San Francisco Examiner in a racist cartoon portraying the inventor as an ape-like “Chinaman” shouting incomprehensible jibberish to a group of similarly animalistic operators. As one observer complained, the “smashing and banging of the machine and the fierce shouts of the working force suggest a riot in a boiler factory.”

Just over a decade later, a patent for a new model of Chinese typewriter was awarded to Qi Xuan, a young engineering student at New York University. A native of South China, Qi had spent years developing an easier-to-use arrangement of Chinese characters, one that enabled typists to locate words at a much faster rate.

This innovation mattered little to American journalists, however, who instead reveled in recounting the humorous story of the very first letter inscribed on Qi’s apparatus. Authored by the Chinese Consul-General of New York for the Chinese Minister in Washington, the message took two hours to complete despite a length of only one hundred words. Discounted was the fact that the operator had never used the machine before in his life, that he had not received training in Qi’s system of arranging characters, and that he was no doubt interacting with both the inventor and journalists during the process.

The same condescending tone pervaded media accounts in the years following, as in a Washington Post article published two years later about a newly patented machine which surpassed that of Qi. Entitled “The Newest Inventions,” the article placed the new model of Chinese typewriter alongside such absurdities as a “dancing radiator doll” and “a mouse trap for burglars.”

Two decades and nearly one dozen patents later, inventors in the forties and fifties began to develop Chinese typewriters of unprecedented sophistication. Two inventors in particular, Gao Zhongqin and Lin Yutang, created designs that caught the attention of IBM and Merganthaler.

IBM teamed up with Gao to create an electric model capable of producing roughly six thousand characters using only forty-three keys (fewer than most Macintosh laptops). Mergantheler joined forces with Lin, who was already something of a celebrity in America owing to his two New York Times bestselling novels. Like Gao’s machine, Lin’s “Mingkwai” model was also based on a pioneering system of categorizing characters which enabled users to type upwards of ninety thousand different characters using only seventy-two keys.

Despite the unprecedented achievements of both machines, however, neither was able to dislodge the longstanding stereotype. IBM failed to find a market for its prototype or to overcome the widespread assumption that Chinese typewriters were, regardless of their sophistication, curiosities at best and absurdities at worst. Lin’s machine fared somewhat better, praised by some as a device that would “revolutionize Chinese office work.”

To the reporters at the Chicago Daily Tribune, however, news of Lin’s invention was received with an emotion “transcending dismay and yet appreciably milder than despair.” By tangling himself in this silly business of Chinese typewriter (which the reporter assumed must have been “the size of a pipe organ”) the reputation of “our favorite Oriental author” had been sullied. Responses such as these undoubtedly contributed to the difficulties Lin faced in finding a market for his machine. Unable to recoup his research and development expenses, Lin ultimately fell into bankrtuptcy and was pursued by the IRS well into the 1950s.

Over the subsequent two decades, inventors in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States went on to develop ever more sophisticated and commercially popular models of Chinese typewriters. By the 1970s, their designs had become so advanced, in fact, that the line began to blur between electric Chinese typewriters and early Chinese computers.

On the mainland, engineers developed a pen-based machine that increased speeds by means of an early form of predictive text, anticipating the now widely popular technology by more than two decades. Another engineer, Yeh Chen-hui, used what he had learned from designing a Chinese typewriter to develop a machine that revolutionized the newspaper industry in Taiwan, leading to the complete abandonment of manual typesetting in a number of major publishing houses. To this day, Yeh maintains that his machine was the first true word processor.

Despite this long history of technological achievement equal to, if not more impressive than its Roman alphabet counterpart, the Chinese typewriter has remained an icon of backwardness in the West. When it is not openly ridiculed, at most the machine has served as a medium through which artists have explored the comical, the strange, and the ironic, as in the short-lived mystery series “The Chinese Typewriter” starring eighties hearththrob Tom Selleck, the similarly titled film by experimental artist Daniel Barnett, and the carnivalesque ditty “Her Chinese Typewriter” by indie rocker Matthew Friedberger.

Even The Simpsons entered the fray in 2001. Having been hired to write fortune cookies, Homer Simpson is shown dictating pithy jewels of wisdom to his daughter, who is taking dictation on a Chinese typewriter. “You will invent a humorous toilet lid”; “You will find true love on Flag Day”; “Your store is being robbed, Apu.” He pauses for a moment to confirm that she is keeping up. “Are you getting all this, Lisa?” The frame switches to Lisa, who is postured nervously in front of the absurdly complex machine, pressing buttons slowly and with hesitation. In elongated, uncertain syllables she responds: “I don’t knowwwwww.”

It appears that, faced with a rapidly changing China, our views have remained trapped in a past that never actually existed.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Chinese Nation (forthcoming from University of California Press) and is currently writing a global history of the Chinese typewriter. He can be reached at tsmullaney@stanford.edu

The Hunger Strike Begins

This piece is excerpted from Philip J. Cunningham’s manuscript of his forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham's book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website. 

By Philip J. Cunningham

The idea that the campus was under student control struck me as a dangerous illusion. Bright and others said campus life had changed for the better, and in the aftermath of May 4, I could see evidence of the soaring change in spirit. But what if the whiff of freedom turned into a mockery of the same, a transient window of openness that served to make people implicate themselves? It had happened before in the 1950s, when Mao urged “a hundred schools of thought to contend,” only to punish those who expressed themselves too freely.

…


To date, the campus strike was having its desired effect of keeping people out of class, but cutting class does not a revolution make. Sleeping late and not doing homework is a temptation few students can easily refuse. The non-action implicit in not going to class had to be accompanied by some kind of action to have any meaning at all.

The courtyard was abuzz with loud announcements blurting out of the hijacked, jerry-rigged amplification system. What might in theory be freewheeling talk akin to the ramblings of a college radio station was instead sounding uncompromising and strident, like a new party line. The drive to convince the moderate student body not to attend class, having largely succeeded, cleared the way for more radical action. The buzz was all about a big hunger strike.

As the BBC crew continued to track down colorful visuals, I approached a forlorn-looking young man who was sitting alone amidst the swirl of activity kicking up in the middle of the dusty courtyard. He was wearing a white headband with two black characters inked on: *JUE-SHI.*

"Why do you write ‘refuse food’ on your headband?" I asked, adopting the tone of a reporter without really thinking about it.

"The government just ignores us. We want dialogue. Maybe if we starve ourselves they will pay attention," he said.

There was something off-putting about his explanation. It was unfathomable to me that a young person would starve to death as an attention-grabbing stunt. Here the stated cause was laughably hollow--risking the ultimate sacrifice for a chance to talk with Li Peng. I pressed the would-be martyr on the matter, curious about his personal reason for joining.

"I don't know," he said dully, no doubt taken aback by the volley of questions from the inquisitive foreigner. "It's not personal."

"What if the government ignores you?" I moved closer to him and lowered my voice, aware that our conversation was attracting curious ears.

"We demand dialogue and a reversal of the unjust April twenty-sixth editorial!" he declared with unexpected volume, to the approval of his contemporaries who were now tightly squeezing in around us.

"What if there is no dialogue?"

"Then we die," he said, winning somber nods of approval. His performance gave me the goose bumps.

I moved on, but subsequent conversations with other individuals quickly turned into group affairs. It was sad and frustrating to meet such earnest young men and women, all apparently willing to put their lives on the line, only to hear them give pat answers, sometimes even grandiose answers, magnified by peer pressure. Did those nodding in approval realize they were urging psychologically confused, approval-hungry classmates to court death? To what end?

Things were polarizing rapidly, making me feel hopelessly lost in the middle. Overturning the unjust verdict of an incendiary newspaper editorial was an aim both discreet and desirable, but what could possibly be the end goal of “dialogue?” Who was to say that dialogue had been achieved, or not? If hunger strikers started to drop, where would it all end?

The May 4 rally and the May 10 protest were framed largely in the name of free speech. Both events were peaceful, good-spirited and I supported them wholeheartedly. I had plunged into a turbulent sea of confusion in both instances, trusting the instincts and judgment of friends. The result was uplifting; I was pleased to lend moral support to a movement driven by good cheer and an idealistic outlook. But now things were taking a potentially destructive turn, for a hunger strike implied a kind of self-inflicted violence.

A hunger strike also introduced a ticking time bomb into the equation; things must be resolved in less time than it takes to die of starvation. It subjected both supporters and “the enemy” to emotional blackmail, not unlike a person who threatens suicide to manipulate or punish others for their lack of attention. Short of capitulation, terms of which were left dangerously undefined, on the government side, the unspoken end result would be death. This was no celebratory parade calling for free speech and cultural revival; it was a veritable death march.

Sitting on the steps of the small monument in the middle of the courtyard I watched as more and more grim-looking young men emerged from the residence hall wearing white headbands emblazoned with *JUE-SHI* painted in black. The strikers gathered around the monument in the middle of the rectangular quad, bringing to mind the way the protesters in recent days had gravitated to the Monument of the People’s Heroes, which commemorated martyrdom in Mao’s calligraphy, in the very heart of Tiananmen Square.

Headbanded delegations of students from other colleges began to arrive, giving Shida the doom and gloom of a kamikaze camp. Whither the joyous, life-affirming spirit of May Fourth?

We had stumbled upon this radical stab for attention quite fortuitously, a combination of BBC's search for a non-existant "Democracy Wall at Xidan," Min's erratic driving and my curiosity to see what was happening on my home campus. I mingled with the strikers and their supporters, aware I was being watched more closely than before, but curious to see where the idea of a hunger strike came from. I couldn’t think of any examples in Chinese history, though India had elevated the hunger strike to an almost spiritual art. I had just seen some quotes by the progressive Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore in one of the student posters but no mention of Mahatma Gandhi. Where the student admirers of Tagore aware of his famous criticism of Gandhi, saying that even non-violent tactics were a hurtful weapon of sorts?

None of those queried could point to a precedent for this type of protest in China. The strikers I talked to tended to give knee-jerk answers to my questions, to the tune of dialogue or death, unwilling to consider the implications of the strike in honest terms or even begin to question decisions made by their “leaders.” It bothered me to see such courage coupled with an unquestioning attitude. To me, these young patriots had lost perspective and were fired up by peer pressure to take part in a dangerous "quest."

As with the kamikaze pilots of Japan and the daring guerilla martyrs of the Chinese Revolution, extreme devotion coupled with intense social pressure made it possible to cast a false glow on pointlessly suicidal activities. But I was baffled that otherwise privileged students in a nation that had known much too much hunger should starve themselves for any abstraction, let alone such a poorly conceived one.

Brian found me, asking if I had lined up some students to interview.

"Well, it’s hard to say. I just talked with a few students over there. They are on a hunger strike," I explained. “They demand dialogue with the government. There one of them, see, with the headband?”

"How good is his English?" he asked.

"I don't know. I wasn't speaking English."

"What's the point of talking to someone in Chinese?" he said, which I thought was a pretty incredible statement to make in China. But he had a job to do, an overseas audience in mind, whereas I was indulging my own curiosity.

"Well, I say we have enough. We're finished doing the posters, that's what we came for, isn't it?"

"But I think this is a good chance to talk to some of the hunger strikers."

"Phil? We can talk to them later."

We were on the verge of going back to the hotel for lunch when I learned that the hunger strikers were signing "wills" and making pledges to maintain group unity, to be unswerving in their determination to the death. The courtyard was now swirling with students wearing the ominous white headbands. Then I saw a familiar face among the hard-core strikers.

Lily! What was she doing with the radical contingent?

My gut reaction was that Lily, a simple honest soul from a small farming village, an appreciative young woman who didn’t hide her thrill to be attending a university in the national capital, was caving in to peer pressure. Bright and Jenny had the self-esteem and instincts of self-preservation to avoid the trap of something like a hunger strike, but Lily? I approached her stealthily, aware that she was surrounded by strike organizers. When she spotted me she couldn't suppress a cordial smile, but watchful stares from her peers signaled that she ought to assume a less communicative, more appropriately solemn demeanor. She wasn’t free to be the Lily, the delightful woman of an impoverished province who I liked and knew. She was now an anonymous comrade, a patriotic hunger striker.

We talked briefly, but the conversation was limited to platitudes. She had never been particularly articulate about politics to begin with, and my presence, a foreign male hanging out with a TV crew of unknown provenance made her extremely self-conscious. I made reference to people and places we both enjoyed, hoping to jump-start a conversation, but she had lost her normal playfulness and sense of humor. When I pressed her as to why she was going on a hunger strike, she gave me the same pat answers as everybody else.

"We want open dialogue with the government."

"Oh, come on, what do you really want?"

"Hmm, I'm not sure, but. . ."

One of Lily's head-banded comrades intervened silently, poking his head into our conversation with the precision of a directional mike. I gave him an exasperated look, hoping to continue a bit longer.

"What were you saying?" I pressed for an answer.

"We want a reversal of the April twenty-sixth verdict!"

I had to wonder if she was fearful or if she already felt the effects of fasting since breakfast. Most Chinese students I knew couldn’t even skip a meal without feeling ill effects, already her lips were parched and dry. I really felt bad for her and tried to “reach” her but couldn’t get through.

There was some kind of indoctrination going on, but that’s not to say there was a mastermind or the process was coercive in any way. Rather, for students such as her who had endured years of rote-learning, and considered it a privilege to be in the city, there was readiness to take cues from the environment and allow a kind of auto-indoctrination to kick in. In the end, all I could do was wish her luck as she went back to her group and I went back to mine.


A short while later there were excited shouts.

"Beida is here!"

"Political Science and Law is here!"

"Shida! Get ready for the march," a cheerleader shouted. "Assemble into your groups!"

The hunger strikers and supporters from other schools came pouring onto campus. Once again a mass of students converged on the sports ground. Once again the dusty basketball court was transformed into a sea of enthusiastic young people waving red flags to the singsong rhythm of rote slogans, redundant chants and crackling voices on megaphones. Beida, Qinghua, Political Science and Law and People's University contingents gathered and joined forces to map out a joint strategy.


The final march to the Square was about to begin.

Understanding China’s “Angry Youth”

Two things that China Beat has been tracking since we began are Chinese nationalism and youth attitudes in the PRC today (those interested in these issues might check out Alec Ash's recent posting that addresses youth nationalism in regard to the 5/8 anniversary).

It's no surprise, then, that we were interested in learning more about an event at the Brookings Institution that brought these topics together (Evan Osnos mentioned his participation at his blog).

So we turned to Teresa Wright, one of the people who shared the stage with Osnos at the panel, to fill us in on the discussion that took place. She is a professor of political science based just up the road from UCI at Cal State Long Beach, and the author of The Perils of Protest: State Repression and Student Activism in China and Taiwan, a book of special relevance just now, since it includes an analysis of the Beijing demonstrations and massacre of 1989, as well as a close look at Taipei unrest of the early 1990s. Here's her take on the roundtable:

By Teresa Wright

Two weeks ago, an event at the Brookings Institution explored the proclivities of China’s post-1980 (bashi hou) generation of young people—a group that often is characterized as “angry/indignant” (fennu) and anti-foreign.

Just how angry are China’s young people, and toward whom or what is their anger directed? What do their attitudes tell us about China’s political trajectory, and how should the citizens and governments of other countries respond?

The overall message of the event was that Western anxieties about China’s so-called “angry youth” (fenqing) are overblown. For behind superficial images, such as those of young Chinese aggressively defending the CCP’s Tibet policy in the spring of 2008, lie complex configurations of attitudes and values that defy simplistic characterization.

As emphasized by Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China, the apparent “anger” of Chinese youth can just as accurately be viewed as “energy” or “confidence.” Further, as noted by panelists Stan Rosen, Xu Wu, Evan Osnos, and myself, along with displaying great love of country (aiguo, or patriotism) and sometimes nationalism (minzuzhuyi), young people in China are vocal advocates of “liberal” values such as freedom of expression and outspoken critics of corruption within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They are not knee-jerk apologists for the CCP.

Yet at the same time, they feel unjustly slighted by the international community. As Xu Wu put it, Chinese youths are like a “double-edged sword with no handle”—a force that can cut in a number of directions, and that is not controlled by any single individual, organization, or interest.
In addition, panelists emphasized that many of the most vocal fenqing in China today—such as Tang Jie, producer of the widely-viewed video, “2008 China Stand Up”—are extremely well-educated and intelligent. Their anger and indignation cannot be dismissed as the product of ignorance or brain-washing.

In terms of how foreigners should respond to China’s youth, the lesson is something that some Americans (and other Westerners) may not want to hear: rather than treating China’s young people as misguided individuals in need of enlightenment, we need to accept them on their own terms, and with respect. Many Chinese today—both young and old—have a sense of pride, a feeling that China is finally “getting it right.”

What is emerging in China—culturally, socially, economically, and politically—looks different from the conception of “modernity” that many Westerners hold dear. Rather than criticizing China, its government, and its people for failing to aspire to this Western model of modernity, we need acknowledge their successes, and accept that their developmental goals and destination may be different from our own.

When I articulated these final thoughts during the question and answer session at the event, I wasn’t sure how the audience would respond. As soon as the event concluded, two young Chinese students studying in the U.S. approached me. They emphasized over and over again how grateful they were for my comments, as if it was the first time that they had heard a Western “pundit” voice such thoughts. Perhaps by starting from an attitude of respect rather than condescension, we may be able to defuse the angry indignation of China’s fenqing, and open the door to more fruitful dialogue.

One Year Ago

A year ago, we were glued to our televisions and computers, like so many others in China and around the world, watching a tragedy unfold in Sichuan. The news we saw from the earthquake zone was bleak and heartbreaking.

Several news sites have run memorials, one-year on, and we’ve selected a few of those in the reader below. We also point you to some of the coverage we ran at China Beat in the days that followed.

1.One of the things Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley stressed in a piece for China Beat last May was that Chinese volunteerism was not a brand-new phenomenon, instead linking to a strain in the late Qing. The volunteer spirit that has emerged in response to the earthquake, however, has continued to draw attention, as in this piece at the Christian Science Monitor.

2.China has officially expressed its “gratitude” for international aid, a situation many were tracking a year ago.

3. Richard Kraus noted the historical resonances of the efforts to preserve “Grandpa” Wen’s calligraphy in Sichuan. Wen Jiabao’s written words have continued to be a source of interest, as shown by this piece about Wen sending handwritten notes to earthquake survivors.

4.The Chinese Red Cross has continued to be an important source of aid to survivors, as discussed in this piece from the Telegraph. In a two-part piece last year, Caroline Reeves wrote about the history of the Chinese Red Cross (part 1, part 2).

5.Some of you may remember that NPR reporters Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were coincidentally in Sichuan when the earthquake struck. NPR has been providing in-depth one-year coverage of the earthquake, including this piece on the sensitive topic of children who died in their classrooms. In a piece last spring, Peter Hessler relayed correspondence with his former students—about whom he wrote in River Town—immediately after the earthquake, many discussing the events at their local schools.

We ran a few other pieces at CB one year ago that readers may continue to find interesting (if you didn’t read them the first time around): Susan Brownell’s consideration of the Tangshan earthquake and the Montreal Olympics, Steve Smith’s investigation of the role rumor played in the Sichuan earthquake, and Don Sutton’s piece on the mourning rituals after the earthquake.

May 10, 1989: Demonstration of Ten Thousand Bicycles

This piece is excerpted from Philip J. Cunningham’s manuscript of his forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

By Philip J. Cunningham

For a few days there it seemed that the successful student march of May 4 would be the last of the big demos and soon everyone would be back on campus attending classes again. Railing against this rather pleasant and natural inclination, strident wall posters at Shida and Beida called for continuing the student strike. One of the more florid campus wall posters that I managed to snap a photo of was a florid eulogy to the Great Hall of the People as a symbol of representative rule. The dark message, written on May 5, 1989 was at odds with the general euphoria in the wake of the May 4 March, for it predicted an outcome with blood flowing down Chang’an Boulevard. Brushed in ink on a large sheet of paper, written with such literary flourish that I needed help to decipher it, the poem was signed by an anonymous author who went by the name, “The Wild One.”

“*Drawing blood on Chang’an Jie until the dawn dawns red, smashing to bits the bona fide dream of the people*.”

On the morning of May 10, the student-rigged loudspeakers at the center of the Beijing University campus started crackling with a call to action. A Beida physics student explained they were calling on other schools to join Beida students in a new form of protest with Chinese characteristics: the bicycle demonstration!

We sat on our bikes under a tree near the front gate of Beida to observe the hatching of this new and unusual type of protest. The "marchers" rolled in from all directions, mostly walking their bicycles due to the utter congestion. Like earlier protests, which used patriotic anthems as a cover for covert political action, the demo on wheels could hide in plain sight in a city of a million tinkling bicycles.

The tree-lined road leading to the main gate on campus was by now attracting black bicycles like crows, watching and waiting for a sign to take flight en masse.

The long-legged Chen Li shifted restlessly on her bicycle as her mind wrestled with indecision. It seemed that she had almost made up her mind to join the demonstration when some annoying static over the student broadcast system brought to mind another problem.

Just who were the so-called student leaders? They hadn’t been voted into office. They had just sort of seized the initiative. Chen Li bristled at the idea of taking the lead from such presumptuous peers, wondering instead what her teachers would counsel. The problem with the student movement, it seemed to her, was that it was run by students.

It was one o'clock, at least a thousand bicycles were amassed on the tree-lined road leading to South Gate, but there was no discernible movement in a forward direction. Then a few minutes after the hour, a sudden crescendo of tinkling bicycle bells alerted us that the pent-up energy of the waiting cyclists was about to be unleashed. To the background of jangling rings, screeching brakes, flopping pedals and soft thud of rubber tires bumping into the spokes of other bicycle wheels, the demonstration creakily commenced.

Beida professors, some of whom lived in apartments near South Gate, were on the scene, talking to students and in some cases actively cheering them on, much to Chen Li’s delight. But most of the older campus residents kept their distance. Whether it was the wisdom of age or bitter memories of the Cultural Revolution not yet faded, many of them watched wistfully from the windows and balconies of the ramshackle teacher's dormitories.

All at once, the mass of a million spokes and wheels, greasy chains and kickstands heaved into motion again. Enmeshed in a traffic jam at the starting gate, the metallic parade of creaking, entangled bicycles slowly lurched forward, balanced and propelled by feet, more often on the ground than on pedal. Because it took just a few wobbly bicycles to block a narrow path, the campus gate became a bottleneck, slowing egress even though the security guards did nothing to stop the flow.

Once we rolled off campus and hit the lightly-trafficked streets of Haidian district, the mass of bicycles speeded up in concert, a forward movement that felt truly liberating. All demonstrators, from flag bearers to group leaders, were on mount, so when we finally hit open road, it was possible to race en masse at a flag-whipping speed.

The plan as we understood it was to go around Beijing following the perimeter of the circuitous ring road, to breach Tiananmen Square and then to stage a protest at the People’s Daily compound on Chaoyang Road, but first we had to join forces with allies from other campuses.

"It's a 40-kilometer circle," I heard someone say, "When we get downtown, just follow the old city wall of Beijing."

Chen Li was well aware of the iconic importance of the route, but she was no hot-headed activist. Unlike some late-joiners who pedaled with double the enthusiasm, she continued to show hesitation and review her options at each main juncture along the way. Twice we pulled out from the convoy at her insistence when it looked like there might be trouble from the police. I appreciated her caution, I was a bit worried myself. But what impressed me more was that she did not fall into lockstep behind the bossy “student leaders” up front who were by now commanding the metaphorical ten thousand troops. The only thing more surprising than the speed with which a handful of rash students took control was the willingness of so many intelligent individuals to become followers.

True, the march would not have taken wing if everyone adopted the cautious wait-and-see attitude the two of us did. And some of the students leaders at Beida, Wang Dan in particular, were considered to be thoughtful and reasonable, but the rapidity with which Chinese students fell into line and accepted group think troubled me nonetheless.

But as we cruised breezily down the car-free streets, meeting up with other wheeled university contingents, a kind of ragtag mass euphoria built with each addition to the ranks.

…


When at last we got close to Chang’an Boulevard, the turn to Tiananmen was blocked by police. Word had it that the police had been firm but not unfriendly, and we saw no fighting or confrontation. The traffic police were just doing their job, cordoning off the section of Chang'an Boulevard that ran past the leadership headquarters at Zhongnanhai on the way to Tiananmen. If the men in uniform had been sticklers about not allowing a left turn towards the Square, they showed little concern for what we demonstrators might do elsewhere. That was someone else's responsibility.

Beijing's grid-like layout of large east/west avenues criss-crossed by north/south roads made it nearly impossible to lose one's bearings. It became immediately obvious when we turned south after a feint to the west that we were still headed for Tiananmen after all, only in a roundabout way.

The snakelike chain of cycles doubled back to head for our unspoken destination. Successfully overcoming the police roadblock doubled the good spirits; the collective mood was ecstatic and electric. The indirect route to the Square offered no obstacle to our forward motion. It was hard to believe that the traffic police were so dim-witted as to fall for the ruse, it seems more likely they were following orders to the letter without enthusiasm. Once they had stopped us from turning east onto Chang'an Boulevard, they didn’t seem to care where we went. It was as if they put up a perfunctory show of opposition to the march, not in real opposition, but so as not to get in trouble for not doing their job. Bureaucracy at its best!

When we got to broad Qianmen Avenue we veered east, making a nosedive to Tiananmen, as inexorably as if pulled by gravity. It was here, as the rows of onlookers thickened, as the cyclists pedaled harder, that Chen Li heard a variation of *laowai paobu* that she was kind enough to share with me. What were people saying at the sight of me today? *Laowai qi zixingche! * --Whitey rides the bike!

As we picked up speed, spirits soared. The flying wedge leading the pack thinned out to about five bicycles abreast, stretching the malleable procession in length. It was a race to beat the police to the Square, or so it felt as we hit our clunky bike pedals at an accelerating clip. This kinetic frenzy got the adrenaline going, there was no stopping our unauthorized procession now. Whatever residual indecisiveness my companion might have had was largely overcome by the inspiring sight of fellow cyclists boldly careening forward. Butterflies in the stomach took flight as we made the final invigorating plunge towards the Square.

As the bicycle procession reached the southwestern outskirts of the Tiananmen area, I couldn't imagine pulling out, even if there were police waiting. I didn't want to miss the thrill of streaming across the symbolic plaza in this swift, fluid convoy of thousands, holding aloft fluttering flags, wheeling it for free speech.

The mad dash across Tiananmen Square was the high point, a defiant burst of energy propelled us clear across the forbidden ground in a giant, diagonal slash. There were pockets of urban well-wishers and curious rural tourists who out of friendly support, or fear of speeding bicycles, stepped back from the bicycle course to form a line of observers on both sides. We sped along like chessboard knights across the graph-like matrix of the Square, starting in the lower left hand corner going two steps north, one step east, then one step north and two steps east, finally exiting on the upper right hand side.

The vivid pathway cut by us cyclists swooshing across the Square was volatile and transient; it lasted only as long as the last bicycle in the procession. Banners strapped to bicycles and some huge red flags were held high in the air, balanced deftly by skilled cyclists. The way the flags whipped in the wind created an air of excitement. The red headbands, representing blood, rebellion and speed, were perfect for the course. How else could we identify our cyclists in a city of several million bicycles?

From the vantage point of a gliding bicycle, it was a magnificent scene. Before us and behind us, red flags and school banners lashed the air and unfurled in the jet stream of rushing cycles. This gave the illusion that flags and banners, some strapped to bicycles, others held aloft by skilled cyclists, were flying above the crowd under their own power, like the magical brooms of the sorcerer's apprentice.

As the vanguard zig-zagged in search of openings through the crowd ahead of us, I suddenly had to wonder. Where did all the spectators come from, anyway? At least some of the onlookers appeared to be supporters because they lined up, deliberately holding up traffic it seemed, to create a protective corridor for the demonstrators to slip through. By the time we reached the northeast quadrant of the Square, the banks of spectators were four or five deep on each side, shouting in unison and clapping in support.

The mood was defiant but confident, not only because the police had backed off, but because there was a sense of safety due to the tacit support of townspeople and the growing camaraderie of fellow cyclists. Thanks to the exhilarating movement across the square, all my doubts, and I think those of Chen Li, about whether or not one should get involved in such an event vanished. I, for one, was exactly where I wanted to be.

The speedy rivulet of bicycles got dammed up at Nanchizi intersection just beyond the Square, while the vanguard of group facilitators dealt with some obstruction and conferred on which way to go. Tires bumped against tires, and the mobile procession slowed, scrunched up into a immobile mass of protesters, some dismounting, others resting with feet on the ground for balance. Then the signal to continue reached us and was duly passed along, one voice at a time until what seemed like a million shiny spokes were soon creaking back in motion, revolving down Chang'an Boulevard, transporting the saddled riders to the diplomatic section of town.

And that’s when we realized we weren’t alone.

“Look, over there! Foreign journalists!”

As we rolled past the Beijing Hotel we could see foreign film crews scrambling to set up their cameras to capture this unusual and uniquely Chinese demonstration on film. Unlike the well-documented marches of April 27 and May 4, it seemed as if the foreign press had been caught unprepared by this one. But that was a relief in a way, for cameras have an unnatural effect on people on both sides of the lens. As the brusque men with big cameras scrambled up their ladders, taking aim at us, I could sense a kind of shy pride laced with a touch of humiliation. We were targets being hunted by big roving lenses, reduced to a kind of native wildlife.

It was hard to determine if being on TV was good news or bad news. Had the press been tipped off by the government about an imminent crackdown, or had they been tipped off by the students about the illegal rally?

We kept our eyes on the road, generally ignoring the cameras and sped along on our way. I heard student cyclists complain that a bunch of journalists had shown up the other day at the last minute, when it looked like the police might stage a crackdown, and had they left just as quickly when the crisis passed. To see newsmen arrive on the scene was a bit like sighting vultures; they were just doing their job, of course, but their appearance was often a sign of trouble.

So what was I to make of BBC’s offer of a few days freelance work--interpreting, taking news crews around Beijing— in preparation for the Gorbachev visit a few days hence? I had no press accreditation, so it was a strictly off the books arrangement, a few days work at the local hire rate. I had to wonder if running around with the foreign media was a worthwhile opportunity or mere opportunistic voyeurism, a professional way of looking for trouble.