Reading Roundup

1. A very cool set of reports from 1949 on what happened in Shanghai sixty years ago when the Communist Party took control (Hat tip: Shanghaiist).

2. Alec Ash continues with brief insights on critical issues. Here’s a nugget on the Chinese “brain drain.”

3. A very smart review of Zhao's memoir by Richard Rigby at East Asia Forum:

What was not generally known at the time to outside observers was Zhao’s determination, mentioned several times in the book, that he not go down in history as the General Secretary who approved unleashing the PLA against the demonstrators.

In so doing he sealed his political fate, but also ensured his name would be added to the (all too long) list of upright officials who throughout Chinese history did the right thing – to their cost, but to their own, and China’s, ultimate credit.

The fascination of the book, though, goes much further than Zhao’s account of the June 4 events.

It will be mined in great detail by many for the insights it provides into the evolution of the economic reform program, the twists and turns of internal party struggles, the paramount role of Deng Xiaoping (but even his power was not unlimited), the serious differences within the reform camp over political reform (and in Zhao’s case, the way his thinking on this issue changed, and continued to do following his removal from power), Zhao’s insightful pen-portraits of his erstwhile colleagues, and his frank admissions of various policy mistakes (in particular the mishandling of the price reform of 1988).

Most of all, the book stands out as the sole account of how things worked – and in some, but not all ways, presumably still do – at the very top of the Chinese political system, by one who was there.

(Go to East Asia Forum for more.)

4. Check out an intriguing new blog (hat tip: Victor Mair) called The China Society Pages that features translations of quirky Chinese new stories (some of which also appear at CNReviews), including recent entries like “Husband and Wife Sue His Former Mistress,” “Widowed Chicken Disconsolate over Loss of Rooster,” and “Man Stabs Father 6 Times Killing Him, Then Goes Back to Bed.” You get the idea.

5. China is trying to manage its international profile the same way it does at home: by creating media, this time aimed at foreigners. Hear the story at NPR.

5/22/89: The Hunger of Provincials

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

On the evening of May 22, BBC asked me to take one of the crews to the Square for a closer look at the protest, which was thought to be on the wane now that martial law was coming into force. We did the usual look-see, I conducted a few spot interviews and the talented camera crew captured ironic and iconic visuals. Then we took a break in front of the History Museum, parking the hotel van near the camp of the provincial students. 

The protesters around us didn't seem to mind our presence, until we decided to crack out the beverages. It was hard to enjoy the hotel-bought drinks we had kept stored in an icebox in the back of the van while in the midst of so many under-nourished, homeless students from the countryside. 

The problem of eating well in front of people who had less access to food was a familiar one, something I had experienced on the set of The Last Emperor and Empire of the Sun. We almost had a riot one day on the during a location shot on the Bund for the Spielberg film, as the cast and crew ate a hotel-catered lunch in the midst of 5000 hungry extras whose food had been duly paid for but never arrived, due to some sticky-fingered comprador or official intermediary. 

Thus it was with some reluctance that I extracted a can of iced cold soda from the icebox. Just then I noticed a young man in dusty clothes staring at me through thick black-rimmed glasses, eyeing the Coke I had in my hand. He had a wiry build and sported a flattop crew cut that made him look more a police cadet than student. But there was something extremely sympathetic about him too, he had a wide-eyed but vulnerable expression on his face, as if he wanted to talk but was afraid. I offered him a can of soda from the BBC icebox. 

"Thank you, man!" he said nervously in English. He smiled like a baby who had just gotten his bottle. He downed the bubbly drink so fast I felt sorry for him. 

"Here you go, friend." I said, tossing him another. 

"Do you know about the fighting outside the city?" He asked, face drawn with earnest tension until he burped. 

"What? Fighting? Tell me about it." 

"The troops starting beating the common people," he said, rushing into a description of the incident. 

"How do you know about this?" 

"I was there!" he said authoritatively. "Do you want to know about it? Are you a reporter?" 

"Sort of. An interpreter. A freelancer, actually. For the BBC. That's the crew," I said, pointing to the tailgate party. 

"Nice vehicle, what model is that?" he asked. 

"I don't have the slightest idea," I answered honestly. He looked me over from head to toe as if to say how could you not know what model of car you have? 

"I'm Wang Li," he said. "I'm from Xian. I give you this information." He handed me some scribbled ideographs on a crumpled sheet of paper. 

"Listen, little Wang, you can call me Jin, ‘jin’ as in gold. Jin Peili," 

Taking a closer look at his notes, I could barely make out his writing, but there was a list of some place names, times and dates. 

"Thanks for the information, but the BBC probably won't have the time to look into such a specific incident, even recorded in detail such as this." 

"But isn't this news?" 

"It may be," I said. "But TV news is, um, different. There's a lot of information that never makes it on air." He looked as disappointed as a puppy that had just returned a stick that its owner didn't want to throw anymore. 

"This might be useful for a newspaper, but TV news is, well, forget it." 

"Do you want more information?" he asked. 

"Sure, let's keep in touch," I said, not sure if I meant it or not. I had met too many unusual characters lately, and some of them were so weird I had lost confidence in the cliché that a stranger was a friend I hadn't met yet. 

"Okay, I tell you what," I said, trying not to sound too encouraging, "if you have some interesting news, you can call me at the Beijing Hotel, my room number is 1413. And how can I get in touch with you?" 

"I am always here, on Tiananmen Square, with the provincial students," he said. "Just ask for Wang Li from Xian." 

Later that evening he telephoned my room, waking me up. 

"I'm Wang Li," the husky voice says, "I met you on the Square, I have something very important to tell you." 

"What time is it now?" 

"12:15, I'm in the downstairs coffee shop waiting for you." 

"Okay, okay, I'll be right down." 

Coffee shop? At this time of night? Not in the Beijing Hotel. This place closes down early. So what does he want? Food, I could offer him, a place to stay? Well. Anticipating his request, I opened the refrigerator and stuffed all the food and drink I could squeeze into my shoulder bag.

 

The lobby is dark and forbidding. The red carpet is inky, almost black. There are no attendants anywhere in sight. When I pass the decorative screen that is designed to keep ghosts out of the lobby I can see some people sitting in the empty coffee lounge. Four young men, no, it's three men and a woman sitting around a low round table masked in shadow. At an adjacent table I can make out the silhouette of two young men. One of them leaps up and waves me over excitedly. It is Wang Li. 

"Jin, ni hao," Wang Li says in greeting, approaching me with outstretched hands. "This is my friend Hu, he is also a student from Xian," he says. Hu and I say hello and shake hands while Wang Li fumbles nervously in his pockets for something. "Here are our student ID cards, I want you to trust us." 

I scan the cards briefly in the dim light and give them back. I put the fruit juice and snacks on the table and take a seat. 

"Jin, there is so much I have to tell you," Wang Li erupts, as if we were old friends. 

"Have something to drink first," I insist, trying to pre-empt his request. I hand him some food and drink. He hands me a jagged piece of paper with notes scribbled on it. I can't help but notice that the coffee shop menu that lay open on the table had part of a page ripped out of it that matched the angular shape of his note like a jigsaw puzzle piece. 

Written in the coffee-stained margins next to "CHILLED LYCHEES IN SYRUP" and "YOGHURT WITH HONEY" are scribbled the words: "Liuliqiao, army troops, 70 civilians receive injury, tomorrow huge demonstration in protest." 

Wang Li and Hu gulp down the juice and ravage the snacks as if they had just ended a private hunger strike. While they eat, I look at the other table where a group of four young people are talking in low whispers next to the ornate ghost screen that blocked view from the entrance. 

"Listen, troops have arrived northeast of Beijing. There are thousands of soldiers, tanks, and I heard there are trucks full of ammunition," Wang Li says, as if trying to earn his keep. 

"How do you know?" 

"We were there," he says with a hint of pride. And then anticipating further questions, he adds, "We know a journalist needs evidence, so we want to go back and take pictures." 

"Isn't that kind of risky?" 

"No, we must do it, Jin. Can I borrow your camera?" He reads the doubt on my face. "You can keep my ID card until I return with the camera." 

"No, no, that's not necessary. I trust you," I respond, using the immortal words of someone about to be conned. Actually I didn’t trust him. If anything his offer of the ID made me a little suspicious. If he were really a student why was he flashing his ID around? No one else did that. 

"Thank you," he says, looking greatly relieved. "You are a friend." 

"Where have you been sleeping?" 

"On the Square," he answers. 

"What about tonight?" 

"No sleep. We will be out all night looking for troops." 

“You have to get some sleep some time,” I answer, playing the role of older brother. I didn’t have that kind of stamina or drive. 

I was starting to admire this guy’s dedication to the cause. 

"I'll tell you what, tomorrow you can shower and nap in my room if you want, okay?" 

Even as the words left my mouth I wasn’t sure why I made the offer, but it got me off the hook tonight. And I did feel for these ragamuffins. We shared a powerful curiosity in common; we were interested in finding out what was really going on, but we weren’t journalists, not them, not me. I couldn’t forget how I was almost reduced to sleeping on the streets during the early vigils at Tiananmen. 

"Can you give me some film, too?" he pleads, revealing sharper bargaining skills as my skepticism softened. 

"Yeah, okay. By the way," I ask, pointing to the figures in the shadows about 20 feet away, "Who are those people sitting at the table over there?" 

"They're our student leaders. That's Wang Dan, Wuerkaixi, Chai Ling and Feng Congde." 

"The student leaders?" I ask in disbelief. Isn’t this a government hotel? 

We got up to leave. I walked past the other table to get a closer look. The quiet conference in progress momentarily went silent as we walked by. On the way out, I give my camera to Wang Li, not sure if I'd see it or him again. Even so I felt a pang of guilt. Is it right for me to encourage him to go running after troops? 

And what are the student leaders doing in the Beijing Hotel in the middle of the night? Is someone protecting them, do they have a powerful benefactor in the building? It’s close to Tiananmen Square, and in a way, it's a good hideout. After all, who would expect to find them here? Like Shanghai in the ‘30s where the underground communists frequented the same bars, brothels and hotels as the anti-communist city bosses, Beijing was becoming a city of shadowy intrigue.

Better City, Better Life, Part II

By Gina Anne Russo

In my first post on the "Better City, Better Life" Expo promotion campaign, I focused on the centrality within it of visions of Shanghai as a special sort of distinctively modern and distinctively international Chinese metropolis, but here I'll emphasize the second half of the slogan, which draws attention to the quality of urban existence. Expo public advertisements don't just glorify Shanghai’s place in the modern world, they also strive to present Shanghai as a place where good behavior is on display. For example, on the subway one day I ran across a person dressed up as Haibao, and he was surrounded by people in vests that read “Make this city better, be a loveable Shanghaier.” Along with being cute and loveable, however, the most common adjective connected with expected “Expo” behavior is wenming I have been in Shanghai now for nine months, and within those nine months more and more small signs, specifically in very public places, have popped up, telling people how they should be behaving. For example, most escalators now read “stand on the right, walk on the left, use the escalators in a wenming way.” Or, “Don't spit on buses, be more wenming.”

Wenming is difficult to define. Most dictionaries say it means “civilized,” but this definition carries as many problematic connotations in Chinese as it does in English. Leo Lee, in his book Shanghai Modern, traces the development of this word in modern Chinese. The term was originally borrowed from the Japanese, who used the same characters (pronounced differently of course) in the late nineteenth century to define behavior that was specifically “modern” and “Western,” thus maintaining the same connotations as “civilized” in English. This was picked up by China at the beginning of the twentieth century with similar effect.. The Nationalist government in the 1930s emphasized wenming behavior; it was often used in publications promoting the New Life Movement put forth by Chiang Kai-shek, a movement which encouraged people to be more hygienic and well mannered in terms of clothes, food, behavior, and deportment.. If we look at textbooks affiliated with the drive to improve weisheng (hygiene or health)—another complex term, whose links to visions of urban modernity are the subject of an important recent book by Ruth Rogaski we see them using similar language: calling on readers to raise the level of China’s weisheng by being wenming in the way they use the bathroom, stand in line, and so on.

According to Lee, this word shifted in connotation after 1949 to mean “manners” rather than “Western defined behavior.” However, it seems to me that in today’s usage, the meaning still carries this kind of “civilized” meaning. The term tells people not to do things that are considered uncouth or uncivilized by the international community, and by “international community” the reference remains Europe and North America (with Japan or Singapore getting an occasional look-in as perhaps honorary members of the Western modernity club) In this sense, the Expo is connected with making the lives of Shanghai people better, (hence the “better life”) which is inextricably tied with a population that maintains “modern” and “civilized” behavior.

Other public advertisements emphasize Shanghai’s “coming of age” as it becomes a modern part of the Western world in 2010. At Hongqiao airport, for example, a large mural depicts Shanghai (represented by the Oriental Pearl Tower) as it is connected with the rest of the world. Representations from outside China include the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Coliseum, and the Empire State Building. A friend from Hong Kong with whom I was traveling bitterly commented, “So I guess Africa and South America don't count?”

While this may seem a somewhat simplistic way to read these advertisements, representation of the third world are almost always absent in images of the “global community” (and you’ll look in vane in such visual representations for any sign of India, which constitutes ¼ of the global community). And a final illustration of this phenomenon brings us back to one place you see Haibao, which is on the interactive TV screens located in many Shanghai taxis. While riding in these cabs, people can watch sponsored advertisements (including ones for the new Barbie Store) or play “Expo” games, ranging from a Dance-Dance-Revolution-like one featuring a gyrating Haibao to trivia quizzes that test (and thereby try to increase?) your knowledge of the “world,” via answering questions like “What utensils are used to eat pizza?” and “What type of wine is served with fish and spaghetti?” I’ve only seen one non-Western country even mentioned in these games, and it was Japan, and it only figured in one of the many trivia games on offer in the taxis. The message that this sends is that modernity the West, and Shanghai is ready to become a major player in the modern global community. And this will happen with the Expo, the ultimate symbol of Shanghai’s crossover.

With the Expo less than a year away, Shanghai has a lot of preparation still ahead of it (the most pressing of which are the massive building planned in Pudong). But philosophically, Shanghai has been waiting for this opportunity to regain its status as the center of gravity for China’s modernity for decades. To Shanghai people, this has always been Shanghai’s legacy, and current advertisements feed this sentiment by both naming Shanghai as China’s most modern city and tying it to the Western world, creating, in a sense, a two-dimensional modern identity, both national and international. And while these messages include a certain amount of nationalistic fervor, the real star of the show is not China, but China’s most modern city, its gateway to the rest of the world. 

Should China Copy the West on Academic Integrity?

By Susan D. Blum

In recent years, articles have appeared from time to time in the Western press that deal with cases of plagiarism in China and speculated on what these incidents may reveal about how academic life and the educational system in the PRC work.  When we learned that anthropologist Susan Blum, one of the contributors to China Beyond the Headlines, a book that was co-edited by a contributor to China Beat (Timothy Weston) and in a sense was trying to do in print form some of the things that this blog now tries to do online, has been combining writing about various aspects of Chinese culture with writing about plagiarism in the U.S. (and elsewhere), we thought it would be great to get her to reflect for us on what is and is not unusual about the situation in the PRC.  Here's what Blum, the author of a new book called My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture as well as an earlier work on deception and truth in China, Lies that Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), had to say in response our invitation:

Plagiarism. Doesn’t the very word send chills down your spine? It resembles plague, after all (even though it has no genetic connection to it), and a plague must sicken us all. So the cases of plagiarism and academic misconduct, fraud, copying, and misrepresentation that are the latest ills to beset China make for great journalistic stories. China should, by some accounts, take its lead from the “West,” and especially from the United States.

In case you haven’t noticed, the United States too is consumed by worries about plagiarism and violations of academic integrity. But we have the sense that things are worse in China.

The whole topic of plagiarism depends on related ideas of originality. By a certain logic, developed in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an author should write original works (Woodmansee 1984, Rose 1993), and should be paid—in both money and “credit”—for that contribution, especially because the best authors were seen as geniuses, inspired by their Muse or by God. The unique work of each of these geniuses should be acknowledged. And paid.

Thus was born the notion of copyright, which is connected with but not identical to the admonition to give credit to our sources.

Academic writing, which is not always—to say the least—touched by genius, borrows from this sense that the author has made a unique contribution and should be gestured to. But it also has a professional scaffolding, the guild rules, if you will, that uses a person’s prior learning to demonstrate proper deference and training. We do that, as Anthony Grafton showed in his book The Footnote, in our footnotes. They give credit. They allow readers to pursue our line of thinking. And they show that we are following the rules.

These are the rules we teach our students and these are the rules we follow, at least when we do follow them.

In the United States college students fail to follow these rules sometimes; in surveys about 66% of our students admit to using uncited material. They do so for a variety of reasons: The rules are extremely subtle and difficult to master properly. The students are busy with a variety of other compelling activities and don’t want to take the time on a particular assignment. The assignment is meaningless to the student. The student has waited until the last minute and just needs to fill up pages, with anything. Some of these reasons may have to do with integrity and some with failed education.

But you can imagine a different notion of writing, a different path in history that does not regard writing as an individual possession. (Many of our students do, in this age of collaboration and Wikis.)

You could imagine a notion of writing where sharing was more important than hording.

You could imagine an academic system where people were hired and rewarded on the basis of contacts, seniority, and cooperation rather than publication and competition.

You could imagine a notion of education where quoting authority showed the proper deference of youth.

You could even imagine a place where a culture hero claimed “I transmit, I do not invent (or create).” (This saying is attributed to Kongzi, known as Confucius, in The Analects.)

Such a place would have a different set of rules about what is supposed to be found in footnotes and in papers, and writing in this place would not be seen as violating universal morality, but rather as following its own logic.

Until very recently, these have been some of the rules governing academic writing in China.

Now, of course, China has left behind its twentieth-century academic isolation and would like to make intellectual contributions to the global academic world. China is now producing more people with higher education degrees than the U.S. and India combined, according to the BBC.  China is investing heavily in tertiary education. China’s faculty are no longer rewarded simply for loyalty.

So new rules are evolving.

And like all social change, it is clear that it happens unevenly. Now that several Chinese universities are ranked in the top 100 in the world, and collaborations between Chinese and foreign scholars are common, Chinese universities have agreed to follow “international” notions of academic integrity, meaning that all work must declare its origins. (Never mind that there is great variation among nations in how this is regarded.) Deference has given way to the confident claims of invention.

As in any high-stakes system—the SAT, Wall Street, publication in prestigious fora—one finds some individuals willing to take enormous risks. Some are sociopaths, such as journalist Stephen Glass who fabricated an entire story in The New Republic. Some claim sloppiness, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin. Scientists wishing glory may also write fraudulent papers, such as three recent professors at Zhejiang University. He Haibo copied and fabricated results published or submitted to eight journals; two colleagues were implicated with him. China Daily called it the “biggest-ever academic scandal.”

Here we have a case with several possible explanations:

--Chinese people cheat.

--Some Chinese people cheat.

--Some people cheat.

--China follows imperfectly international guild rules about academic practices.

--China’s acceptance of the rules of academic citation are in flux and so far have been mastered imperfectly.

Which answer is preferable may depend on whether you want China to be similar to or different from people elsewhere, and whether you believe in an enduring Chinese essence.

I believe that in some sense the rules of academic conduct are arbitrary, but like any game, the players must follow the rules. Violations occur occasionally, both in the West and in Asia, and are rarely caught or punished. The American Historical Association recognized its powerlessness in enforcing rules against plagiarism in 2003, though it encouraged historians to follow and teach students about proper rules of conduct.

There are some traditional practices that may endure in China, such as having novices quote from authorities as part of their education, and there is a tendency to regard communication as effective based on the results it produces.

But there are also new forces at play in China, having to do with the way academics are compensated for speed of publication and uniqueness of contribution.

In this sense China is copying the economic structure of the Western academy. And in this sense the temptations for cutting corners in order to “scoop” everyone else or at least to pile on publications are just like ours.

In this sense, imitation may be the best form of flattery, but both the source and the copier would profit from a different model.

Sources Cited
Grafton, Anthony. 1997. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Rose, Mark. 1993. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Woodmansee, Martha. 1984. “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17: 425-48.

Susan D. Blum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of the recent works Lies that Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths (Rowman and Littlefield 2007) and My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (Cornell University Press 2009).

Better City, Better Life

By Gina Anne Russo

This month began with the countdown clocks ticking away the time until the start of the 2010 Shanghai Expo hitting the one-year-to-go point, and the weeks that have followed have seen the international press pay a good deal of attention to this upcoming event, which had gotten relatively little media coverage in the Western media. There have been a flurry of op-eds (including this one by China Beat's Jeff Wasserstrom), reports on the question of whether the U.S. will have a national pavilion (such as this one by Shanghai Scrap's Adam Minter), and feature stories on the city of Shanghai that highlight the build-up to the Expo (such as this one in the Washington Post). In addition, while Shanghai-based publications had long been trumpeting its importance, the focus on it in major Chinese national press organs also increased last month, with Beijing Review, for example, devoting several articles to it in a recent Shanghai-themed issue (particularly noteworthy is this one by Fudan University historian Li Tiangang).

In light of this, we thought this was a good time to ask Gina Anne Russo, a Fulbright scholar based in the city that is gearing up for the Expo, and someone whose "Gina in Shanghai" blog had caught our attention, to fill our readers in on the publicity campaign under way to whip up enthusiasm for an event that has been called an "Economic Olympics" and also "China's First World's Fair" and will run from May 1-October 31 of 2010. We'll be running her response in two parts, which focus on different aspects of the "Better City, Better Life" slogan that is being used to promote the extravaganza:

Shanghai has had a history of personality cults that permeate the visual landscape of the city. However, today, Mao’s presence, ubiquitous only 40 years ago, has all but faded —though you can still find some reminders that he was once omnipresent, such as the big statue of the Chairman that continues to stand on the East China Normal University and the kitsch items for sale at Shanghai souvenir stalls (though these are aimed largely at foreigners). Even the pervasive symbols of American consumerism Colonel Sanders’ and Ronald McDonald’s are not as common as they once were—though each of them have some statues as well, standing (the Colonel) or sitting (the clown) near the entrances to venues selling buckets of chicken and Big Macs, respectively. Today, the latest personality to overcome Shanghai's visual landscape is quite different, a symbol of neither Communist Revolution nor capitalist consumer culture. His name is Haibao.

Haibao, a bright blue wave with a face, is in constant public view. His animated likeness looks out at you from TV screen advertisments in subways, his picture looms down on you from the walls of construction zones, his statue is an even more popular photo subject at the Yu Gardens than the Ming architecture, and he is even often seen dancing on a giant LCD screen that moves slowly up and down the Huangpu River on a barge.

His cult of personality displaces all others, including those of the Olympic Friendlies (not so last year) and Barbie (whose pink allure is celebrated in the city now that it is home to the world’s first megastore devoted to the doll), and he brings with him a simple message: the World Expo is coming to Shanghai, and with it a new chance for Shanghai to become internationally recognized as China's most progressive and global city. The important word in that last statement, the one that draws the distinction between the message of the Expo and of the Olympics (mega-events that have been linked in various ways, including similar roles for countdown clocks and promotional videos featuring Jackie Chan), is the word “city,” not “country,” and this distinction illustrates a lot of underlying issues regarding Shanghai's own self understanding.

The slogans for both events, the Olympics and the Expo, illuminate this distinction. Whereas the Olympic slogan reads “One world, one dream,” connecting China to a world of nations, the Expo slogan reads “Better city, better life,” putting Shanghai on the map of globalized cities, not countries. Creating this type of identity for Shanghai is not difficult either, as Shanghai historically has always seen itself as connected, yet separate, from the rest of China, a gateway through which China connects with the rest of the modern world.

This is similarly emphasized in academic discourse. It is no accident that many books about China’s search for modernization are almost entirely concerned with Shanghai and present the city’s modern history as unique (though other treaty-ports sometimes get a look in as well). Leo Ou-fan Lee and Yeh Wen-hsin, along with countless others, have demonstrated that Shanghai was the birthplace of the modern Chinese nation because of its unique cultural connection with the outside world at the beginning of the twentieth century.

I did my senior thesis research about the magazine Ling Long, a Shanghai women's magazine from the 1930s. The layout and message of this magazine very clearly demonstrated the way that modern people, specifically modern women, should look and act. These modern Shanghaiers lived a unique lifestyle of "East meets West," a lifestyle that could be lived in Shanghai but no other Chinese metropolis. At the same time, Shanghai’s city landscape and unique institutions gave way to this lifestyle, and also fed the belief among Shanghai people that they were the leaders of the modern world in China, and even in Asia as a whole.

The current campaigns for the Expo play upon this Shanghainese notion that it is the center of Chinese urban modernity. One particular advertisement that seems to run on constant replay on twenty meter high screens on the sides of skyscrapers depicts Haibao’s journey through China. He first stops in Yunnan where he is greeted by the Miao people, in traditional costume (the Miao costume includes a very large and distinct white and red headress), who offer him local gifts. He then moves onto Xinjiang, where Uigher girls in flowing country dresses offer him grapes (a regional specialty) and play traditional Uigher instruments around him as he smiles and dances. Then, suddenly, we see a man in a light cotton button up shirt and slacks and a girl in a Western sundress, and they run along a road lined with modern skyscrapers and they take pictures of Haibao with their digital cameras.

The distinction between the “traditional” and “modern” is accentuated by the fact that our modern Shanghairen (Shanghainese) actually watch the “traditional” scenes on a TV screen on a skyscraper (where, in real life, this whole advertisement is played), making the "traditional" elements seem like a movie, not the real and modern Chinese world (in Shanghai). This advertisement sends a clear message: Shanghai is the end of the natural progression from traditional to modern, and therefore the logical place for the world Expo—the contemporary counterpart to the World’s Fairs of old, the first of which were held in London and Paris when those cities represented state-of-the-art modernity.

Furthermore, while also making the dichotomy between a traditional lifestyle and a “modern” lifestyle, the advertisement also implies that all of China’s elements, its diversity, celebrates Shanghai’s greatness. The advertisement actually ends not in Shanghai, but in Hong Kong, as Hong Kong people wave and welcome Haibao. While this could be interpreted in many different ways, what it seems to symbolize in this context is Hong Kong recognizing Shanghai as the new urban center of China, just as all of China’s different minorities recognize it as well. In a sense, there are many forces at play here: the dichotomy of tradition and modernity, the stark contrast between China’s minorities and Shanghai’s urban elite, and even competition among China’s urban centers. But as all of these places and peoples greet Haibao, they are in fact greeting Shanghai’s coming of age. China is essentially centered around Shanghai.

To be continued in Part II.

A Few Readings around the Web

1. China Digital Times is on our RSS feed, and, hopefully, on yours too—it is one of the essential places where English-language readers can find easily accessible updates of what is happening in China and in the Chinese media and blogosphere. CNReviews has posted an interview with CDT’s Sophie Beach that gives further details about the site’s management and goals.

2. In the interview, Beach also mentions her own website (好妈妈) on raising bilingual children, chockfull of information and references for those who are interested. At Hao Mama, Beach references Anna Greenspan’s website, Waking Giants, on Greenspan’s experiences sending her son to local school in Shanghai. We linked to Waking Giants when it first launched (Greenspan contributed a piece on the melamine scandal to the China Beat-based book, China in 2008), but the blog has grown since then, including interesting posts on the growing cult for the 2010 Expo mascot, Haibao.

3. For a one-stop shop of interesting pieces on China, check out this page at The Guardian for a week-long feature called “China at the Crossroads” (十字路口的中国). The Guardian has also launched a Chinese version, featuring a selection of its articles. For more about this service (done by volunteer translators at Yeeyan), see here.

4. The USC’s US-China Institute hosts US-China Today, a website we’ve been checking in with regularly for its quality content on a variety of China-related subjects. As examples, check out features stories “From Gold Farmers to Kings: Online Gaming in China” by Steven Jefferson and Peter Winter or “Missionaries of Sound” on Chinese hip-hop by Jonathan Hwang (full disclosure: Hwang is a UCI undergrad and studies with China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom). Many of the contributors to US-China Today are undergraduates and graduate students.

5. There have been a number of memorials in the past week for the victims of last year’s earthquake. Given that a year ago, China Beat ran excerpts of letters from Peter Hessler’s former students, many of whom are now teachers themselves, we found this piece at Alec Ash’s blog (Six), particularly interesting. Written by a guest poster, Ash’s friend Katrina Hamlin, the post reflects on how Hamlin’s students in Chengdu have been processing the disaster.

5/18/89: Working Class Heroes

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 atCunningham’s website. 

By Philip J. Cunningham

New, creative links were being made, reflected in the flags and slogans draped on industrial strength trucks with factory logos packed to the brim with red-sashed workers. 

WORKERS SUPPORT BRIGADE! 

WORKERS UNITED WITH STUDENTS IN SUPPORT! 

But the really eye-catching, breath-stopping slogans took aim at the most powerful man in China. 

XIAOPING GAODE RENREN FENFEN BU PING 

"Wow! You see that Lotus? It says Xiaoping is ruining it for all of us!" 

Quite a few posters and political cartoons were openly critical of Deng, representing a logical but politically dangerous turn of heart. But the most novel element today was the large number of Mao portraits. Militant workers proudly held portraits of Mao aloft. Mao? Where did they dig Mao up from? Was this Cultural Revolution nostalgia or an oblique way of insulting Deng, who was thrice-purged under Mao? 

Open-back trucks crammed with factory workers were festooned with flags. Nearly all the banners proclaimed "shengyuan xuesheng" in one form or another, it was the orthodox and politically correct way of mouthing support for the students. 

"It's like a second Cultural Revolution!" I suggested. Lotus who had visited China during the middle of that turbulent period, found some validity with my hyperbolic statement. The crew was unconvinced. 

"The workers, the Mao posters," I said, letting the hot sun and the steamy heat get to me, as the last of the puddles from the morning’s rain evaporated. "This might even be the work of the old leftists, who resent the capitalist tendencies of Deng’s China. Deng’s the target. It's unbelievable!" 

A few feet away, the drivers were involved in a noisy argument about matters less abstract. The bald-headed tout, a bully if there ever was one, was intimidating the vendors who he claimed had overcharged him for the price of the yogurt and orange drink. To a seasoned operator such as he, bargaining down a price was clearly a one-way street. Pay less when paying others, demand more when getting paid. 

My sudden appearance quieted the argument. I asked each man present what he thought of the huge gathering around us. 

"Very good," said the bald, burly driver, answering in English, sticking his thick thumb up in the air. "Like this!" 

His cohort, whose suspicious darting eyes and unshaven, unkempt appearance gave him the air of a character who had just escaped from a mental hospital, turned to the lead tout for a cue, then shook his head up and down in hearty agreement. "Like this," he said, thumbs up. "Good money and no police!" 

The good money was obviously a reference to us. As for the police, I guess he was right. I hadn't seen a man in uniform in days. 

"Shut up, you fool!" the bald man said in reprimand to his mate. 

A short distance away the BBC guys chatted with Lotus, and through her, with my driver, a paragon of politeness in contrast to the two foul-mouthed touts who had glommed onto the crew at the hotel entrance. The lead tout, pleading lunchtime, had made it clear we were going nowhere fast, so I decided to walk around a bit." 

The ground was getting dirty underfoot, the Square had an air of neglect, litter everywhere, the air redolent of urine and the stench of chemical disinfectant. It smelled like a disaster waiting to happen. How many rotations involving how many millions of footsteps could this huge, human cyclone undergo before people got hurt, sick or trampled? 

The morning rain was the first of several bad omens for the demonstrators of Tiananmen who had enjoyed fresh air and cooperative, sunny skies for several weeks now. The protester’s resourcefulness seemed to know no limits, however, and a fleet of buses were soon driven to the Square, providing a safe, dry shelter for the weakened hunger strikers. In a way that was strangely consonant with radical Christianity, it was the weakest people who were most important; the sick, meek and emaciated were the VIP's in this world of tables turned, temples spurned. 

As the movement grew more complex, simple slogans seemed to suffice: 

PEOPLE’S CRY! 

PEOPLE’S VOICE! 

PEOPLE’S TORMENT! 

Hidden dangers abounded. The pavement prone strikers lowered their resistance to infection, and not a few people still on their feet also were walking time bombs due to stress, long hours, poor hygiene, forced proximity to countless germs and exposure to the elements. Rumors of a cholera outbreak were taken seriously, as were rumors that the sanitation complaints were a government ploy to get people off the Square. With such a dense mass of people living in slum-like conditions with no running water, a contagious illness could reach epidemic proportions in no time. 

The Square was thickly carpeted with people, but with water strikers nearing death, the celebratory element was gone, even the chants sounded rote and annoying. The movement of masses of people wasn’t as fluidly cooperative as before. You couldn't walk without annoying others, sometimes you couldn’t walk at all, but had to endure being pressed against strangers, shoulder to shoulder, belly to back, stepping on and being stepped on. At one point, frustrated by the jostling movement, and foul air, I stretched up on my toes to see what was causing the delay when I suddenly found myself lifted off my feet, pinned and suspended an inch or two off the ground. 

…

I crawled under the rope and the human chain momentarily lifted their tightly interlocked arms to let me in. As soon as I passed, the arms interlocked again. The crew, good friends who worked together on a regular basis, watched with stunned indignation. 

"Can he come in too?" I asked my student guide, feeling sorry for Brian. He was a good journalist, the first person at BBC to befriend me. His gregarious warmth and generosity compensated for his temper. 

"Yes, if he is with you,” he consented. 

"Brian? You can come in now," I said. "We can talk to them for five minutes, but no cameras." 

"No cameras? What's the bloody point of going in if we can't take our gear?" he yelled. "Tell him that's nonsense! How come ITN could bring their cameras in?" Brian's face reddened again. He threw his hands in the air in exasperation and stomped away. 

"Let's get out of here!" he yelled to the camera crew. 

His words were followed by the murmur of equally indignant voices saying things about a laowai that I didn’t want to hear. Lotus took it all in with her usual smiling equanimity. 

I stepped forward, careful not to trod on any of the blankets and sleeping bags. Before me were sprawled a dozen limp bodies that belonged in a hospital. 

A thin, handsome man with a high-cheeked, angular face caught my attention. His body was motionless and emaciated but his eyes were bright and alert. He wore a green shirt. 

"You suffer. I admire your courage," I said, respectfully, lacking the chutzpah to scold him and his fellow strikers for their stupidity. Instead of telling them to go home and have some hot chicken soup, I told them a little about myself. 

"My name is Jin Peili, I study Chinese, do you know the Insider Guest House at Shida?" Not knowing whom to talk to, I addressed them as a group, but my eyes kept going back to the man with the bright eyes. 

A young man in the middle of the row of fatigued bodies, smudged-up glasses dangling low off his gaunt, angular face, was the first to answer. "I am Han. Where did you learn Chinese?" 

"I learned Chinese from my friends." 

"Please tell others about what you see. We seek dialogue with the government" 

"I understand." 

"We are willing to die for our country," he whispered. 

That gave me the chills and I was unable to respond with a sensible comment. A deja-vu refrain of I can't believe this is happening to me raced through my mind. This is my life, is this is really happening? 

"Can you hear the cry?" Han asked. "Can you hear the cry of China?" 

His plaintive call gave me a lump in the throat and I remained speechless. Seeing his arm reach upward, I took his hand in mine. The sharp-eyed student guards looked on, smiling weakly. Some strikers watched us, attentively, while others, though awake and conscious, stared blankly as before. I was greeted by yet another striker who asked me how long it took me to learn Chinese, a familiar and friendly question that seemed outright absurd coming from a student who wouldn’t be studying anything anymore if he followed his act of sacrifice to its brutal conclusion. 

I continued to field questions, the familiar set of questions a foreigner learns to deal with like it or not, and as I spoke, I could detect a few smiles out of the corner of my eye. Maybe I said something wrong or mispronounced something with a funny accent. Even in their dismal emaciated state, they could get a kick out of hearing a “laowai” speak Chinese. 

Did the death wish of the water strikers ennoble the student movement or darken it with disrespect for life? Did widespread popular support, the non-stop swirl of sympathizers and admirers unwittingly put pressure on the elect heroes to do themselves in? If making jokes at my expense got them back on a more normal track of thinking, I couldn’t begrudge them that. 

The peer pressure was palpable on May 13 when the hunger strike began, how much greater it must be now, with a nation electrified and millions marching in their name? 

There is no graceful exit from a hunger strike that does not achieve its aims. Dui-hua, or "dialogue" is the stated aim now. But what constitutes dialogue and who is to say whether or dialogue has been achieved? The whole hunger strike struck me as a form of political poker, each side trying to bluff the other into making a concession first. I am sure at least some of the students joined the strike impulsively and felt for them. They might have second thoughts or regrets but no easy way out given the immense peer pressure. It was scary. 

While I was talking to Han, a delirious young man who had been propped up against the door slumped over, head hitting the ground. White-shirted medics put him on a stretcher rushed him into the waiting ambulance. A few minutes ago, my parched throat craved water, now I felt like throwing up. Watching the medics attend to the most recent victim of dehydration, I felt some consolation in the fact that he would be raced to the hospital along the roped off lifeline and force-fed intravenously, diminishing the chance of death. 

…

I gave up any thoughts of further exploration and slowly worked my way back to the BBC rest spot across the road from the entrance to Zhongnanhai where the water strikers had staked their ground. 

Sweaty and disheveled, the BBC crew was biding their time in the shade of a tree. My driver was by himself, keeping a deliberate distance from the other two. He greeted me warmly, though I had hardly spoken to him, and offered me a hand as I clambered up into the passenger seat of his cart. He took a position facing me, reversing his position on his bicycle seat and leaning back on the handlebars to strike a delicate balance. 

"You know much about China, don't you?" he said, using the disarming compliment, “zhongguo tong.” 

"Sometimes I wonder. So, what do you think of all this?" I asked. 

"I was in the Tiananmen incident in 1976," he said. "I know all about such demonstrations. At that time, the crowd was truly of one mind, we spoke the truth. But soon after the demonstration I got arrested. They herded us across the Square and locked us up in the Worker's Park next to the Forbidden City." 

"Over there?" I pointed to a tree-lined wall far in the distance. 

"Yes. I was lucky, I only went to jail. Some disappeared, some were executed. The government decides life and death," he intoned with a whisper, looking around before going on, "I spent the next five years in prison. After prison I could not get a job; that is why I drive a trishaw today." 

"What about the other drivers?" I asked. "Had they been political prisoners too?" 

"Ha, those two jokers?" he said with disbelief. "They don't know the first thing about politics. They are nothing but common criminals." 

"What kind of crimes did they commit?" 

"The fat, bald one, he raped a woman. The one with the beard is a robber, he beat up someone, almost killed him," he explained. "They both just got let out of jail." 

The Open Door was one thing, but opening the doors to prisons was not necessarily in the interests of liberalization. It made me wonder if the Square was being deliberately sowed with social deviants to whip up some trouble. Governments have done stranger things to manipulate crowds and create pretexts for iron-fisted rule. Eyeing the tout and his sidekick with a new appreciation, I thought it a good idea to get the crew back to the hotel before things got really weird. 

We plotted a roundabout route to the hotel, edging along a long pedestrian-choked avenue, going south to head north, essentially circling the Square for expediency. 

We cut close to the sidewalk in front of the Great Hall. Here crowd density was uneven, allowing for spurts of movement followed by pile-ups. Perhaps drawn by the symbolic power of the Great Hall, there were assorted curbside speakers addressing the sensation-hungry throng. A man in a neat suit stood on top of an abandoned car, sharing articulate thoughts with bystanders. An older unshaven man wearing a ragged Mao jacket commanded a rapt audience of his own with boisterous nostalgia for the good old days. A few times the delay was sufficient to prompt the crew to whip out their gear. Subsequently our presence would then serve to augment public interest in whichever speaker was lucky, or unlucky enough, to fall under the focus of our lens. 

The gray-haired soap box orator in the tattered Mao jacket responded to the gaze of our camera by climbing up on the top of a trishaw, waving his hands at us in a ritualized, almost theatrical way, not unlike the way officials did on TV. 

"Foreign friends. My greetings,” his voice boomed. “Where are you from?" 

"We are England television," I hollered back, self-conscious with so many eyes on me. 

"I thank you for being here. You are a good friend of the Chinese people," he said, in slow, simple Chinese of the sort used for children and foreigners. 

A few random bystanders cheered and clapped. 

"I will take you anywhere you want to go, for free," he offered, pointing to his flimsy vehicle. "I don't want any money!" 

The lead driver, who I now knew to be a dangerous criminal, moved closer to me to see what all the commotion was about. I tried looking the other way but he gave me a ten-pound tap on the shoulder to command my immediate attention. 

"Don't listen to that guy," he growled, "He's a lunatic!" 

"How do you know?" 

"Just look at that mother-effing driver preaching up there," the burly man added, poking me in the ribs. "The guy's definitely crazy!" 

Eric took his eye from the viewfinder to look up, sensing trouble, but I told him to keep on filming. 

"I may be….but…a-common-maaaan," the orator in the Mao suit up front said with a vibrato worthy of Martin Luther King, "but I have the dreams of an em-peh-ror!" 

He repeated this refrain, priming the audience. Each time his voice reached a crescendo, he raised his arms to the sky and those gathered round him cheered wildly. 

"Our foreign friend here, right there, he can speak Chinese," he announced, pointing at me. "Tell us, friend. What is your name" 

I mumbled shyly in Chinese. He told me to shout it louder. "Jin Peili!" I said, reluctant to be drawn into his performance. It was like being tapped by a magician looking for volunteers. 

"Jin Peili, --I will work for you! All day! For nothing!" the man sputtered, with emphatic flourish and impeccable timing. "We want the world, the people of the world, to know about the generous spirit of the Chinese people!" 

The man in the Mao jacket served up a string of platitudes with verve, plainspoken enough to find receptive listeners, compelling enough to stir the spectators gathered in our favor, though an angry racist rant, delivered with similar panache might also find a ready audience. 

Both the dumb foreigner treatment and the honored foreign guest routine reminded me what a cultural tightrope we walked, working such an anarchic crush. We were lightning rods for all kinds of touts and taunts. 

The greedy tout insisted we move on, as if the lofty talk of volunteerism might hurt business. He coaxed our convoy of rickshaws to pick up speed, careening this way and that. Twice the lead driver and his sidekick got in arguments with pedestrians and cyclists who had almost been knocked down. One time the bald man slapped a protestor pointblank because he had the temerity not to move out of his way fast enough. 

Yet for all his impatience, the same tout also demanded frequent rest stops and cigarette breaks, all the while cooking up angles to up the fare. As a result, the unassociated cart I shared with Lotus, got way ahead of the others because our driver was content to peddle slowly but steadily without a break. 

We passed incoming delegations of farmers, workers, intellectuals and merchants parading in support of the students, even military supply factories got into the act. One key stratum of Chinese society that had not yet joined in, however, was the military. If that happened, it would be as good as setting off a chain reaction, signaling that the overthrow was all over but for the shouting. The people would truly love an army that loved the people.

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.