History, Generations, and China Stories

In early May, a conference was held at Yale for retiring Chinese historian Jonathan Spence, with several China Beatniks in attendance. Here, Robert Kapp, one of Jonathan Spence's first graduate students, reflects on the shifts in the stories we've told and heard about China during the time that Spence has been active in the field.

By Robert A. Kapp

The retirement of a distinguished scholar and doctoral mentor sometimes goes insufficiently remarked, but in the case of Jonathan Spence’s recent retirement from the Yale History faculty, something better happened. Happily, several of Spence’s Ph.D. students decided to throw their efforts into a conference and celebration in his honor, on the Yale Campus, in early May. The result was a most interesting and varied set of scholarly presentations, a warm and enthusiastic dinner event seasoned with warm reminiscences from generations of young and mid-career Chinese history scholars who received their early training from Spence, and a great many reunions of old friends with shared experiences of graduate life at Yale.

Three attendees in particular – Robert Oxnam, Roger DesForges and I – represented the original tranche of doctoral candidates who finished their degrees under Jonathan’s benign and helpful guidance. We were far and away the oldest Spence “products” in attendance; all three of us began our graduate school lives as students of Spence’s own academic mentors, Professors Arthur F. and Mary C. Wright. Jonathan essentially inherited us from Mary Wright, in particular, as both we and Yale lost an inspiring senior scholar and came to know a brilliant and promising one at the start of what would become a brilliant career in the China field.

While most of the panels at the conference honoring Jonathan Spence consisted of research presentations – many of them on topics, and using tools of scholarly sleuthing – reminiscent of Jonathan’s own compelling works, the last session addressed “China Beyond the Academy,” in the form of a round table with five of Jonathan’s “products” who, over the years, either left academia altogether or who, while remaining active academics, engaged with broader audiences as a part of their China commitment.

These five included Prof. Yili Wu, of Albion College in Michigan; conference organizer Ken Pomeranz of UC Irvine; writer Stephen Platt of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Bob Oxnam, and me. Bob, of course, founded the China Council of the Asia Society in the 1970s and went on to become the Society’s president; I moved from teaching into the world of nonprofit membership associations, winding up as head of the US-China Business Council in Washington, D.C. from 1994 through 2004.

Putting thoughts on paper for this meeting was challenging but liberating, and I ultimately threw down a brief self-introduction, a section on some of the heroes and some of the writings that had affected me most as I led a life of “China Beyond the Academy,” and some additional reflections on the changing landscape and the lessons of “Beyond the Academy” life over what has now become a period of many decades.

With The China Beat’s permission, I’m happy to share the latter two sections here, and welcome comment.

A Few Heroes and a Few Cherished Readings: Marginalists, Contrarians

Jonathan Spence, To Change China: inoculation against self-delusion.
This early book by Spence, long a classic, made a permanent mark on me, with its tales of the mistaken assumptions and ultimately futile illusions of personal transformative influence in China that animated some historically important foreigners but, more often than not, led to disappointment. While not the only book of its theme, this one stayed with me, over the years, a constant reminder to guard against the susceptibilities that brought earlier generations to abrupt, sometimes devastating confrontations with Chinese realities.

Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time: the wedding of tragedy and farce.
I have written on The China Beat before about this book, an elegant and moving, alternately grim and hilarious, memoir of a young American’s experiences in Kuomintang-controlled China during World War II. The authorial voice in this endearing book, and the rhythm of Peck’s narrative descriptions, have, for me, never been rivaled. Contemplating the China of Peck’s observation against the backdrop of today’s China provides endless food for thought.

Robert McClellan, ­The Heathen Chinee: the enduring power of embedded vocabulary.
Robert McClellan remains an obscurity to me, known only through a couple of Web references. The Heathen Chinee, published in 1971 by Ohio State University Press, has never, to my knowledge, become a classic. But its vast assemblage of observations about China and the Chinese, and related imagery, from Boston Brahmins to California labor-movement exclusionists to clergymen and Congressmen and American literati of all sorts, has been valuable to me in thinking about American public and political attitudes toward China.

John Hersey, The Call: The possibilities of fiction. I don’t suppose that The Call has gone down as one of the great works of American literature, but I loved its combination of historical accuracy and engrossing narrative, of a young and unfocused man from upstate New York who hears “the Call” at a missionary lecture one evening and embarks on a life of bringing progress to China under the aegis of the YMCA. Many in lay audiences to whom I have introduced The Call have commented on its attractive power and its value as a learning tool.

Lars Erik Nelson and the Wen Ho Lee affair: majesty in the media.
The late Lars Erik Nelson of The New York Daily News is one of my heroes. His quiet, slashing article, “Washington: The Yellow Peril,” reviewing the infamous Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, in the New York Review of Books, July 15, 1999, exemplified, for me, the ability of the American press to right itself, and to right the American ship, even after the press itself creates the furies that nearly sink the ship in the first place. It is hard, now, to recreate the politically charged firestorm that swirled over China – and the Clinton Administration – in the mid- and late 1990s, but to have lived it is to remember it forever. Gradually, after the huge media onslaught (led by the New York Times, to its sad discredit, and fed by a familiar cast of Inside the Beltway predators) brought things to a very heavy boil, serious critical voices began to fight back. None was more dignified than Nelson’s.

It was, by the way, the fact that China in the 2000 elections, even after the four-year national security furore and the Congressional battle royal over Permanent Normal Trade status for China (PNTR) in the spring of 2000 itself, had no discernible effect on any races, for White House or Congress, that led me to conclude that it is fairly easy to ignite a fire over China in the U.S. but very difficult, if not impossible, to keep it burning for very long.

Dennis Blasko: The Unique Problem of the National Security Discourse.
Dennis Blasko is a retired Army Colonel with plenty of depth on Chinese military affairs, but I cite his book here not for its own uniqueness but for what Blasko represents: a professionally qualified specialist, in a field whose upper echelons remain shrouded from view behind the curtain of national security classification, who nevertheless writes and speaks with skeptical judgment about what is generally said inside the walls of the security community’s discourse on China. The divorce of the security dialogue on China from the rest of the multifaceted discussion of the PRC is, in my view, fraught with danger. Those without “standing” – in the form of employment, security classifications, and professional networks – can find it difficult to locate reality in the shadowy world of China military analysis. Those inside the walls – even the brightest and most responsible – are, in the main, socialized to discover worst-case situations and advice on preventive or retaliatory methods. The press, to the extent that it treats security issues at all, tends to receive and run with handouts from those “inside.” There is, however, a small cadre of credentialed specialists who place such reports in perspective, define and elucidate the real meanings of bandied terms, and generally bring balance to a discourse usually dominated by experts or polemicists to whom the laity is unequipped to respond. Dennis Blasko, then, is a representative figure, albeit a good one. His work and utterances, and those of others of similar intellectual bent, have long since earned my admiration.


Assorted Musings On a Day of Reminiscence

A. Generations. Whatever happened to Terry and the Pirates? Do they matter any more?

I guess another way of raising the Terry and the Pirates point would be to ask readers of China Beat: how many of you have heard of Terry and the Pirates (and the Dragon Lady)? Have you seen it? What do you make of it?

The larger point, obviously is this: have we now so left behind the experiences, once formative, of our encounter with China in the World War II context, that their residue has vanished? For those of us at the Spence conference who entered the China field as young graduate students in the mid-sixties (as the Vietnam War was also metastasizing), the likes of Terry and the Pirates informed our universe – and informed American politics. Four decades later, perhaps all of that baggage is now dropped forever. Maybe “Beyond the Academy” doesn’t matter now; maybe what we need to understand and convey off-campus starts with 1978, or 1989, or something like that. I’m not so sure.

(Then again, whatever happened to Beijing?)

This one is so obvious as to be sort of a throw-away, I guess. The photo was taken outside the Beijing Hotel on my first visit to China in January 1977. Those of us – and there are many – who have been in China for, now thirty-plus years, can’t help but remember how things used to be. Does it matter, when conveying our understandings of China “Beyond the Academy”? I believe it does, but I can understand why many people whose time in China began, say, only in the 1990s, or many Chinese people inside the country who came to mature consciousness only in the last fifteen years, might think otherwise.

(Or China’s Failure to Modernize?)

Well, yes. Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past is still, and will always be, a creative and elegant study. But the whole universe of “Why didn’t China…..?” questions, at least for those seeking to discuss China “Beyond the Academy,” has become quaint: who cares, it seems, about why China “failed” anymore, or why China didn’t have a “scientific revolution”? I am not here making the case for the permanent salience of the old questions, the ones on which we teethed as graduate students forty years ago. But, at a gathering built on reminiscence and recollection of formative years of academic training, it was hard not to come back to this question, with some predictable rubbing of the eyes. Who knows: what paradigms, forty years from NOW, will occasion the scratching of heads?

B. Language Language Language: In the end, it DOES matter. Generational contrasts.

The picture, of course, is “Honey,” from Doonesbury: Google her if she’s new to you. (I met the real person who inspired the character at a Thirty Years of US-China Diplomatic Relations conference in Beijing in January; an accomplished figure with a very, very interesting bi-national background.)

But the point is that, in the end, language is the foundation. The whole subject of “China Beyond the Academy” boils down to how we know what we know, as data and impressions are sifted through layer after layer of translation and interpretation. It’s not to say that complete fluency in Chinese is a prerequisite for standing; to put it the other way around, not having fluent Chinese reading and speaking ability is not an automatic disqualifier of those who would seek to tell others about China. But SOMEBODY in the process needs to have maximum language skills – in each direction. We’re better off than we were when the likes of me went through graduate school, but my overall impression is that we – the United States – still has a long way to go. I’ll let China speak for itself on the subject.

C. Parsing, and Communicating, the Multiplicity of Agendas, Still Challenges



By this point, I’m in the thrall of Google Images. A picture really can be worth many, many words – or at least can serve as a zippy illustration.

For the China Beyond the Academy ranks, motives and intentions, revealed or unrevealed, are a never-ending source of interest. Maybe, at this particular moment, Richard Nixon was simply thinking, “What IS it?”, and maybe Zhou Enlai was only thinking, “I certainly hope our distinguished American guest likes this delicacy,” but most of the time, in this and a myriad other encounters, the mental exercises are more multi-layered and the communication process both more nuanced and more perilous.

D. China as Foil, then and now:

“The Marching Chinese.” Ripley’s Believe It or Not, ca. 1910


“By the end of the year, China will be the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines.[1] The U.S. government's investment in wind is tiny compared to China's, and that means American workers are missing out on millions of new jobs.” (MoveOn.org, April 2009)

Don’t read too much into the visual similarities here, though I found them intriguing. The point is only that China has been, and sometimes remains a foil, a stage on which to play out foreign senses of thrill or danger. Times change: Ripley’s “The Marching Chinese” seems quaint while China’s industrial advances seem stark. But China as illustration, as a challenge from The Beyond, is still with us at times.

E. We each see what we’re equipped to recognize.

Again, this presentation was on “China Beyond the Academy.” The point of this picture – a shot of an anti-Gang of Four poster from January, 1977, was a lesson I learned on my first trip to China, with a University faculty group representing many disciplines. As we visited, the civil engineer among us would comment on the techniques, even the chemistries, involved in building the structures we passed on the street. The Russianist among us would see the Soviet Union in countless passing events or sights. The MD would note the medical conditions of passersby, immediately obvious to him but not to the rest of us. For myself, I would read the posters, vibrant with color against the dim and colorless background of Chinese cities in the first winter months after the end of the Cultural Revolution. What we can recognize pretty much frames what we see – and what we wind up conveying “Beyond the Academy.”

F. FINALLY: STAY HUMBLE


I am sure that only a handful of The China Beat readers will recognize me in the picture above, presented to me by the China staff of the US-China Business Council as a humorous farewell when I left in late 2004. Again, the picture is only for visual effect; the message is, Stay Humble. When China specialists “interpret” China for non-specialist audiences, whether in the schools, in civic groups, for the media, or for anyone else, we need to recognize the limits of our wisdom even as we assist others. Failure to do so will, to recapitulate my first book title above, surely lead to disappointment.

P.S. ABOUT THAT DISSERTATION…..

Pondering how to wrap up my short presentation to a conference honoring my doctoral advisor, I punched the name of the principal provincial militarist of Sichuan in the warlord era into Google Images, and hit paydirt at once. I had written for Spence on provincial militarism in Sichuan in the Republican era, and the heaviest hitter among the contending Sichuan warlords was one Liu Xiang (NOT, from the perspective of recent Olympics, THE Liu Xiang, of course). Here is what I found, another sign of a receding past to be reclassified, or perhaps forgotten.

Feb.10, 2009. Warlord Liu Xiang’s Chongqing Mansion Razed
　核心提示：抗战文物遗址——原川中大军阀、抗战名人刘湘位于重庆的死亡公馆2月9日被拆除，只剩下砖石和梁木，令文物专家十份惋惜





中新网2月9日电 9日，记者在重庆市渝中区化龙桥危旧房屋拆迁片区看到，该市一处抗战文物遗址——原川中大军阀、抗战名人刘湘的公馆被拆除。

据了解，刘湘公馆原是清末最后一任川东道尹柳善的府第，民国初期的四川大军阀刘湘花巨资买下 它整修后，作为川军21军的办公楼与接待政客的地。方，且在这里居住过多年。解放后，这里作为四川造纸研究所办公点，建筑得以完好保护目前，该公馆是重庆 市渝中区挂牌的文物保护建筑。

记者在施工现场看到，刘湘公馆原址只剩下了一片砖石和梁木。十多名施工人员站在瓦砾堆上，繁忙地搬运废弃的石木。

6日，记者曾来此采访。当时，刘湘公馆尚未被拆除，但也仅剩下主体建筑，并已被挖成一座矗立在施工工地中的“孤岛”。日前，经当地媒体报道，因该市化龙桥片区进行房屋拆迁，刘湘公馆去留的难测命运引起当地网民的热议，不少网民建议应对其进行保护。

在得知刘湘公馆被拆除后，一位不愿透露姓名的文物遗址保护专家表示十分惋惜：“刘湘公馆作为抗战文物遗址，具有很高的历史文化研究价值，被拆除十分可惜！” (本文来源：中国新闻网 作者：姜诚意)

Tehran Events and Tiananmen Analogies

With so many references to Tiananmen showing up in the news, we wanted to take a quick break from our time away to recommend a couple of the best uses of 1989 analogies (if we weren't on hiatus, we'd also look at some of the worst, and there have been some pretty bad ones). One powerful rumination on the relevance of China's 1989 for thinking about Iran's 2009 is by Andrew Leonard of the "How the World Works" blog at Salon.com:

He begins as follows:

"In the spring of 1989, the fax machine was China's Twitter -- the miracle technology connecting Chinese democracy activists with each other and the outside world. In Berkeley, Calif., the apartment of one Chinese expat student who owned a fax became a 24/7 information clearinghouse. Documents produced by students camping out on the square would emerge magically from the machine in all their subversive glory"...

Make the jump to read all of his "Tiananmen's Bloody Lessons for Tehran," which went up on Friday and has provoked some interesting comments.

Also noteworthy, from early in the Iran crisis, was a post by Sam Crane at his "Useless Tree" site called "Tehran and Tiananmen."

Posted on June 16, it begins:

"Watching the extraordinary political events unfold in Iran, I am reminded of the massive protests that swept across China twenty years ago. Here are a couple of comparative ideas:

1) Protests of this sort start out spontaneously, in response to some unexpected political event (election fraud in Iran, Hu Yaobang's death in China). But they create a self-reinforcing momentum, driven by the regime's response to popular mobilization. In China, an editorial, reportedly written under the supervision of Deng Xiaoping, was published on April 26th that harshly (in PRC political terms) criticized the student demonstrators. This sparked the massive march of April 27th, which propelled the movement forward.

Are we at that moment in Iran? Whether yesterday's big march develops into a more sustained political movement will depend, in large part, on how the regime proceeds...."

To read the rest, make the jump by clicking here.

China Beat on Vacation

China Beat will be taking a break for the next few weeks as we do a little site maintenance, traveling, and, now that the school year has finally finished at UCI, try to get some breathing in as well.

Though we may post little bits of things if the mood strikes us, expect it to be a rather quiet June around here. We will be back in the swing of things by July.

June 4th Around the World: Notes from One Week After the Anniversary

A week (or so) after the anniversary of the "May 35th" events (as some Chinese netizens put it to circumvent automatic blocks on mention of a highly charged date), we got several more responses to our request to Friends of the Blog for word on how June 4th was commemorated, discussed, or ignored in various parts of the world. The most substantial (reproduced in full below) is a second contribution to the series (click here for her first) by Paola Voci (an Italian-born, American-trained, New Zealand-based specialist in Chinese visual culture whose book, China on Video: Small Screen Realities, is due out later this year). [Her post explains the eye-catching image we are running here, which she sent to us along with her e-mail.]

We also heard from a couple of people regularly or temporarily based in Central or Eastern Europe, both of whom noted how relatively little interest there was in looking back to Tiananmen and connecting China's 1989 to the upheavals that took place in that same year in the region.

Grabriella Ivacs, a Budapest-based archivist at Central European University's extraordinary Open Society Archive (it has holdings on human rights, the history of Communism in Europe in particular, and other topics that are too special to try to summarize, so we'll just encourage readers to make the jump and explore their website, where they'll also find information on the innovative exhibitions OSA has mounted, some of which have dealt at least in part with China) wrote to say that "Hungarian papers and online news portals were not particularly interested in Beijing events" last week. She stressed that "Hungary is going through a serious political crisis, and [the press in] early June was focused on [the] EU election campaign." She notes that there were occasional articles on the anniversary, including one in a "left wing daily," Nepszabadsag, that placed the Massacre "in the context of 1989...the symbolic year of Transition in Eastern and Central Europe," but, "(i)nterestingly," claimed that the "1989 changes in Europe had no direct connection" to the contemporaneous "Beijing events."

A. Tom Grunfeld, an American scholar spending the year in Romania (and a two-time past contributor to this site before), confirmed this sense of relative lack of interest: "Apart from CNN and a single article in every Romanian and Hungarian paper on the appropriate day (edits from the wire services as best as I can make out) there is no interest here."

Here's Paola's comment in full:

Yesterday I got my copy of The New Zealand Listener (the 13-19 July issue) in the mail and, to my surprise, "Has China learnt from the Tiananmen Massacre?" was included as part of a much longer feature story on "Wealth: How Chinese consumers could drive our recovery? " While NZ seemed uninterested to remember June 4th when most other countries' media were covering the anniversary (i.e., just before or on that very day), one of NZ most popular national magazines chose to have a reflection on those events 10 days later, when almost every other national media had moved to different topics. But maybe, rather than reading this choice as a belated answer, one can interpret it as an attempt to look at the event outside the specific temporality of the 20 year anniversary and frame it instead in the on-going economic and political engagement of NZ with China. Tiananmen becomes a provocative footnote to the economic partnership that is both needed and feared by many in NZ.

The Tiananmen anniversary was discussed from two main critical angles: firstly, the issue of forced memory loss imposed by the Chinese government and how, despite the government's efforts, many are still remembering; secondly, much more interestingly (I think), June 4th was remembered with a piece on Zhao Ziyang's Secret Journal (an edited extract from the book's preface (by one of the three co-editors, Adi Ignatius).

But, possibly even more interestingly, the magazine's cover itself was particularly surprising as the image (attached) clearly evokes the visual rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution posters; one wonders how familiar this visual metaphor is to the Kiwi readership. I personally find the cross-cultural mix (or mess?) that the image conveys is really intriguing and open to quite contradictory readings. See and judge for yourself.

Berkshire Encyclopedia on New Media

Berkshire Publishing has recently published its Encyclopedia of China with contributions by China scholars like Sherman Cochran, Kerry Brown, Judy Polumbaum and many others and featuring one thousand entries on a diverse range of historical, social and cultural topics.

A few of the entries caught our attention as a little unusual for a print encyclopedia—including entries on “internet use,” “online social networking,” and “blogging.” As these topics are of particular interest to us (and we’re guessing to many of you, too), we were curious how Berkshire would cover them in the encyclopedia format. Here are a few relevant excerpts (selected from much longer entries), reprinted with Berkshire’s permission.

Internet Use

Internet use if regulated and monitored by the government. Watchers scan website content for hot political issues, such as Falun Gong and the situation in Tibet, and content deemed socially unhealthy, such as pornography and violence. Web masters also monitor online discussions in chat rooms, a method of self-censoring. Generally speaking, Chinese Internet uses accept government intervention much more readily than users in Western countries would do. In CNIP surveys conducted in 2003, 2005, and 2007, more than 80 percent of respondents in China said that the Internet should be controlled (mainly on pornography and violence) and that they government should be the controlling agent.

Social Networking

China’s online youth are finding friendship and solace, as well as information and entertainment, in cyberspace. They are searching for others who can relate to their experiences and who may share their mind-set. Online social networking is also becoming functional and a way to adjust to real-world relationships. Online dating sites, such as lotus.com and love21cn.com (or Jiayuan.com), are increasingly chosen for meeting potential marriage partners. Web portals, such as MSN, Skype, and QQ (which boasts more than 220 million users), are accessed by many merchants as customer-service and marketing tools to reach out to real-world customers...

For many Chinese, online communities offer an alternative to traditional sources of information, an alternative that is often viewed as more trustworthy than corporate or government sources and more relevant than received wisdom handed down from elders with assurances that it is true because they say so.

Social and entertainment infrastructures in China are more limited than they are in the West. The Internet, however, provides easy access to entertainment. Its interactive nature seems to fit particularly well with Chinese culture.

Educational opportunities are still uneven in China, with most major universities and information centers still clustered in and around Beijing and Shanghai, but the Internet allows students anywhere to make use of online databases and other global information sources. Online initiatives are seen as crucial to solving the East-West educational divide…

BBS, relationship management media (sites such as MySpace or Cyworld), massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs), file-sharing systems, and wikis are examples of social media in which many people interact with many other people—from the many to the many. Cyworld is an interesting example. Originating in South Korea, it currently has some 17 million users. It combines the features of MySpace, Flickr, and virtual worlds; its many users upload approximately 6.2 million photos daily. (Flickr, by contrast, uploads approximately 500,000 photos daily.)…

Another interesting phenomenon is the race to be the first to respond to a post. Being the first to respond demonstrates respect; therefore, it has special importance. The first-response slot is given a special name: the “sofa.” People routinely compete to “grab the sofa” 抢沙发, that is, to try to be the first reader to respond.

Blogs

The year 2003 was important for the development of blogs in China; the number of users reached 200,000. In 2004 came the commercialization of the blog. In 2005 blogging spread from the elites to all netizens and non-netizens. In July 2005 the first Chinese blog movie was made. Since 2006 the number of Chinese bloggers has grown rapidly. According to the Survey Report of Chinese Internet, by the end of November 2007 the number of Chinese blogs had reached 72.82 million, whereas the number of Chinese bloggers had reached 47 million—30 million more than in August 2006. Among those bloggers 17 million were active.

The statistics of CNNIC show that only 3 percent of blogs are visited more than one hundred times per day, and 8 percent are visited more than fifty times per day. It is difficult to exploit the advertisement value of blogs if one only operates a single blog as a media forum.

Berkshire Encyclopedia of China 宝库山 中华全书. 5 volumes, 2,754 pages, 8½×11 inches. ISBN 0-9770159-4-7. Published May 2009. Price: US$675 (includes free one-year online individual subscription, value $129). Orders may be placed online, or by e-mail to amy@berkshirepublishing.com. Tel +1 413 528 0206 Fax +1 413 541 0076.

June 4 Around the World: California

We wrote to the peripatetic Pico Iyer, a Friend of the Blog, to see how June 4th was marked wherever he happened to be this year on the anniversary date. He sent us the following ruminations, in which he alludes to the mid-1980s when he first went to Beijing and first saw Lhasa, at a time when each, in ways he's described elsewhere, was a very different place than it is now:

On the Fourth of June--the great annual feast-day at my old English school, the very opposite of its associations for modern Chinese--I was, as I so often am, at my regular Benedictine monastery on the coast of California. The bells tolled for vigils before the light had come up and wisps of fog ran up the eucalyptus-shaded hillside. Then there was silence and more silence until the next tolling of the bells.

Steller's jays landed on my wooden fence. Rabbits scurried off into the undergrowth. The sun rose over a hill to the south, making the ocean below sparkle and recasting us all in a golden light. Thoughts of Beijing in 1985 and Lhasa in the same year came back. Everything changes and turns and goes round and nothing much seems to move at all.

The monastery and the daybreak singing of the white-hooded monks seemed, in certain regards, the perfect way to think and ask questions about modern China's irresistible rise.

Looking Backwards: From 1989 to Han Times and from 2008 to 1964

There have been many efforts during the last month, on this site and elsewhere, to bring history into discussions of the twentieth anniversary of June 4th (particularly via allusions the May 4th Movement of 1919), just as a year ago there were many efforts to bring history into discussions of the Beijing Games (especially via allusions to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Seoul Olympics of 1988). But there's still room for this Top Five list of historically minded pieces on 1989 or 2008 that have just appeared and stand out as especially worth checking out, due to either how deeply they delve into parallels with earlier times or the novelty of their strategies for bringing together past and present.

1) On June 1, Alan Baumler of the estimable Frog-In-A-Well blog, which has separate sections devoted to the histories of different East Asian countries, offered up a very thoughtful look at a precedent for the 1989 student-led protests that pre-dated (by many centuries) the founding of the first modern Chinese university in 1898.

Here's a snippet that we hope will encourage you to make the jump to read all of his "Student Protests in Han China":

"Like most university students, [those of Later Han times, circa 160] were in an anomalous position in society. Imperial University students were members of the elite, but not elite enough to get government jobs just based on their family. Like later students they were also frustrated by their prospects. By the Later Han the curriculum at the University was considered hopelessly out of date and attending was no longer a reliable route to office. Students were deeply concerned with the problems of the state, which is not surprising, and they were particularly concerned with the problem of corruption and favoritism in official appointments, which is also not surprising, given that they were the ones most likely to be passed over if jobs were not given on merit. During this period the student’s enemies were not the Communist Party, but the eunuchs and their faction, who were rivals of the great aristocratic families."

2) On June 2, Duncan Hewitt, the Shanghai-based author of China: Getting Rich First: A Modern Social History, weighed in on the meaning of the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen protests on a Newsweek blog. He has many things of interest to say in this piece, which is well worth reading in its entirety, but one notable point is that the it is not just the details about 1989 but also those about the Democracy Wall Movement that preceded it by roughly a decade that have been fading.

3) On June 5, Evan Osnos ran an insightful piece on his "Letter from China" blog called "The Other Tiananmen Moment," which stressed the importance of thinking about the complex ties between the events of the mid-to-late 1960s and the late 1980s in the minds of some Chinese. (And for more about the Cultural Revolution-era photographs he discusses and shows, see this guest post by Jean Loh we ran in April.)

4) Regular readers of this site have seen many pieces by frequent contributor Susan Brownell exploring different aspects of the Beijing Games, including its parallels to and differences from past Olympics. (And material from those posts is also showcased in China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.) But there's still much new to be learned from her latest publication on the topic, which she has just done for the excellent and wide-ranging Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. She offers her most detailed and sophisticated look to date at the connections between the Beijing Olympics and both of the previous Asian Summer Games, those that took place in Tokyo in 1964 and Seoul in 1988.

5) The same online journal has two other good pieces about Asia and the Olympics. The one with the most historical bent is a fascinating essay on the Tokyo Games by Christian Tagsold, which though focusing on Japan should be of interest to many people more concerned with China. Called "The 1964 Tokyo Olympics as Political Games," it argues, as its title indicates, that the tendency to treat the Japanese Games as more "apolitical" than the Korean and Chinese ones that followed is misleading. (Those in a mood for looking forward rather than backward should be sure to check out as well William W. Kelly's smart companion piece on the prospects for the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, another essay that concentrates on Japan but has relevance for other parts of East Asia as well.)

June 4 Around the World: A Letter from Lima and a Hong Kong Perspective

In this third offering in our series, we limit ourselves to one short post, from a Friend of the Blog who recently moved from Shanghai to Peru, and a brief description of and link to what one of China Beat's longtime contributors, Angilee Shah, has been up to lately: a podcast series on "Global Lives," the most recent of which offers a perspective on Tiananmen from the former Crown Colony turned PRC SAR. For additional reading on June 4 from a perspective that takes you into a different part of the world, check out this piece on France's special connection to the Tiananmen protesters back in 1989 (when the country was celebrating the 200th anniversary of its Revolution). Anyone intrigued to learn more about the long history of Chinese migration to Lima, alluded to in the post, should turn to Adam McKeown's important book comparing and contrasting the histories of Chinese communities in Hawaii, Chicago, and Peru. And for some stunning images of and a report about the large rallies commemorating June 4th held in Hong Kong last week, go here.

Tom Pellman, Lima

Peru's leading newspaper El Comercio printed a brief dispatch from its Beijing correspondent Patricia Castro describing this year's measures by Beijing to pre-empt protests on Tiananmen. Castro's piece mentions the government's banning this year of then-student leader Wu'er Kaixi (exiled to Taiwan after 1989) from re-entering the mainland ahead of the anniversary. Other dissidents and activists in Beijing were also forced to leave the capital, the newspaper reports.

Aside from minor coverage in El Comercio, Peru.com, from Peru's blogosphere, adds a report on Beijing's efforts to censor popular websites like hotmail and twitter in addition to controling the capitol's main square. Interestingly, in a city with more than one hundred years of Chinese immigration and tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants living in Lima, there has been less attention paid to the Tiananment anniversary than might be expected.

Angilee Shah (introducing her latest podcast, taken from her blog):

It’s June 4th today. 20 years ago, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing a huge protest movement was violently suppressed. The numbers are disputed, but hundreds, if not thousands were killed in clashes with the military...the event had a big impact on Anka Lee. He was just a kid then, but he remembers the day well. He was born in Hong Kong and was nine years old that summer in 1989. He talks about his memories and the city where he was born in this episode of Global Lives.

Tom Pellman is a freelance writer and former journalist for China Economic Review. He currently follows China-Latin America affairs at DoubleHandshake.com.

Angilee Shah is a freelance writer and past contributor to China Beat.

6/4 Around the World: The First Sequel

In our second installment of the series (for part one click here), we return to Japan (via a follow-up post by James Farrer on coverage in Tokyo) and offer a view from Hanoi (where long-time Reuters China correspondent John Ruwitch is now based and sometimes writes on themes that link or divide the two countries).

John Ruwitch, Hanoi

Six-four didn't make its way into the official Vietnamese media, of course, but reports about it on CNN, which is widely available in Hanoi, were not censored. When I told a Vietnamese friend I found that mildly surprising, given the somewhat similar positions that the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties find themselves in, plus their much-trumpeted friendship, she laughed and said: "But we hate the Chinese". Long history there, obviously.

I did not scour the VN blogosphere for info on six-four. I did notice, however, that a seasoned journalist/blogger called Huy Duc wrote a blog quoting from the newly published memoirs of one deposed and deceased CCP gen-sec whose name in Vietnamese is "Trieu Tu Duong". Huy Duc discusses how DXP ultimately sided with Li Peng, leading to the crackdown, and comments: "There are men like Li Peng everywhere, but only in places where the fate of a nation lies in the hands of a few individuals could could a network of people be ground up by tanks like that." At the end of the piece, the author concludes: "The aspirations of a people can never be crushed with tanks and bullets." I thought that was fairly strong stuff coming from inside a country where the leadership, again, is engaged in a juggling act similar to that of its giant neighbour and freedom of speech is limited. Then again, the longer I'm in Vietnam, the more I wonder if the differences between the two out number the similarities.

James Farrer, Tokyo

The June 5th Asahi Shinbum provided the final installment of the week long series on the "Tiananmen Incident." As did some of the earlier reports, this half-page feature provides portaits of participants in the 1989 protests and their current situations. The rhetorical emphasis of the articles is on the resilience of their views, despite the repression that immediately followed June 4 and the 20 years of imposed silence. One interview was with the former CCTV announcer Xue Fei who had displayed a notably tragic demeanor during his official announcement of martial law on May 20, and was subsequently fired. He later left China for Hungary in 1992, and returned in 2001 to teach television announcing skills in Beijing. According to the article this Asahi interview was the first time he had agreed to be interviewed in 20 years, but he has "no regrets" about his decision to support the protestors. Other interviews focused on protest participants who have continued as activists in China, including Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer who defends dissidents, Liang Xiaoyan, who leads an environment NGO, and Fu Guoyong, the dissident historian. The message and tone of the final installment of the series thus emphasizes the determination of a very small group of individuals to continue the fight for human rights despite their small numbers and the huge obstacles they face. The Japanese media, including the Asahi, present a generally pessimistic assessment of the possibilities of systemmic political change in China (as in Japan, actually), but these stories of personal "resilience" seem to appeal to Japanese readers.

Note to my earlier post: the chart of protest leaders in the article I described referred only to students, not workers, and included the university affiliations of each individual.

John Ruwitch is the Reuters bureau chief in Vietnam; prior to moving to Hanoi, he lived in Beijing and Hong Kong for seven years covering China.

James Farrer is Director of the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University.

Historical Bafflement of the Chinese People

David Kelly, researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, translated the following opinion piece by overseas political commentator Liang Jing. He has published several previous pieces at China Digital Times, including, “Trigger for an Earthquake in Chinese Society” and “Where Does Wen Jiabao’s Faith Come From?”

One of the most significant cultural phenomena in Chinese society in recent years is the growing interest in history. Everyone—elite and general populace, leftists and rightists—shows an unprecedented enthusiasm for understanding China's past. And in 2009 a series of major historical anniversaries, including the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, have pushed China's “historical fever” to new highs. One of the major reasons stimulating the keen interest in history is that the “reforms” that followed June Fourth, returned China to a “pre-liberation” scenario almost overnight: bureaucratic corruption, moral bankruptcy, social injustice; to the point that, in some important aspects, such as higher education, the status quo in China is not as good as the KMT era, and many phenomena that people thought could not happen again, such as prostitution and the sale of official posts, not only occur, they do so on a far greater scale than in the past.

History has played a big joke on the Chinese, who having experienced countless sufferings and paid the price in countless lives, rather than gaining social progress with their bloody struggle, have turned full circle to find themselves back where they started. How exactly did this come about? Not only the elite, but also many ordinary people are puzzled by this problem. This historical puzzlement of unprecedented numbers of people is what drives China's historically unprecedented “public history movement.”

The heroes emerging from this enlightenment are a group of intellectuals who have consciously and unconsciously enhanced the public's knowledge of history. The role they play in promoting China's social progress may far exceed that of the elite in control of the current political discourse. Two figures who, in my opinion, well represent these “modern heroes”, are Yi Zhongtian, and Shi Yue, who wrote Things Ming under the pen name Dangnian Mingyue [Moonlight Back Then]. One thing these two writers of very different age and experience have in common is use of modern mass media, to tell ordinary people, honestly and wittily, the true logic of the Chinese history in layman's language. They not only subvert the “proper history” as repeatedly distorted by China officialdom, but also upgrade the “unofficial history” of China to new levels, because their telling of Chinese history is imbricated with the spirit and values of modern civilisation.

The old tales retold by Yi Zhongtian and Shi Yue, are clearly a cultural rebellion not only against the official historiography and its materials, but against the CPC’s political message as well. Because they tell people—the younger generation in particular—there are no differences in human terms between the emperors of thousands of years ago and the big shots in the political arena today; no political figures, therefore, should be mystified or treated as sacred. The CPC rulers understand the political implication of this cultural rebellion, of course, hence do not allow the likes of Yi Zhongtian to extend their historical fascination to the CPC’s history. As relations between the KMT and the CPC ease, however, more restricted areas of history are being broken, and as the fruits of research of the network of overseas Chinese continue to break the CPC blockade, a new generation of intellectuals in the PRC can see more and more of the whole picture of China’s modern history.

Even so, optimism about the Chinese people waking up from their historical bafflement, and avoiding being led into another great disaster is hardly called for. The level of materials and artifacts of the China of 90 years ago cannot be compared to today’s, of course; but the degree of political tolerance of those in power, the morale and ideological independence of academia, the energetic spirit of young people in China of that day, were incomparable greater than now. Had they seen the deference and obedience of faculty and students “dancing attendance” upon Hu Jintao when he came to Chinese Agriculture University on May 3, the students and scholars who took part in the May Fourth Movement would have given it a thumbs down.

The paradox of history is that the historical responsibility for China’s subsequent big disasters lies precisely with the movers and shakers of the May Fourth Movement 90 years ago. So, today, many of China's intellectual elite hold severely critical attitudes towards May Fourth cultural radicalism, arguing that cultural conservatism should be the guideline for China’s future development.

I accept that cultural radicalism takes some of the blame for the disasters of the last century, but fail to understand the actual proposals of cultural conservatism. Will cultural conservatism be able to succeed where cultural radicalism has failed? Such simplistic thinking is disturbing. Connected to China’s present realities, the regime controls unprecedented resources, and has formed a huge bureaucratic class who are incapable of providing basic social security to the majority of the population. Officials in Guizhou prostituting young girls [1], profiteers in Ningxia suborning judges in a joint fraud [2]—appalling scandals like these show that the regime is losing its governing capacity. What does it actually mean to call for cultural conservatism it such times? Won’t a day come when the Chinese people, once again falling into historical bafflement, find that when making a stand is called for, no one is there to make it?

* Liang Jing, “Zhongguoren de lishi kunhuo” [Historical bafflement of the Chinese people], 5 May 2009 [梁京：“中国人的历史困惑”， 2009年5月 5日.]

[1] Wang Zhiqiu, “Guizhou Xishui gongzhi renyuan shexian piaoshe younü an kaiting shenli” [Trial of public officials in Xishui, Guizhou charged with prostituting young girls], Xinlang, 8 April 2009 [汪志球： “贵州习水公职人员涉嫌嫖宿幼女案开庭审理”， 新浪，2009年4月 8日 (http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2009-04-08/201517570490.shtml).].

[2] Huang Xiuli, “Ta ba 25 ming faguan la xiashui” [He dragged 25 judges underwater], Nanfang zhoumo, 30 April 2009 [黄秀丽： “他把25名法官拉下水”， 南方周末，2009年4月 30日 (http://www.nanfangdaily.com.cn/epaper/nfzm/content/20090430/ArticelA05002FM.htm).].

A 6/4 Reader

1. Su Yang has never written anything for China Beat, but a few of us get to have lunch with him occasionally as he is a professor (of sociology) at UCI. The Orange County Register profiled Su, discussing his experiences in 1989 and after.

2. Jeff Wasserstrom’s most recent piece at the Huffington Post points out some of the good coverage on China in recent weeks (and sketches some of what was missing or wrong).

3. Friend of the blog and former student leader Wang Chaohua has completed her Ph.D. at UCLA and is graduating this weekend. UCLA Today has a nice profile of Wang that tells her personal story from 1989 to the present.

4. Initially, this page at China Digital Times was blank. Now it has been updated…a little bit…

5. Evan Osnos’s fittingly brief and somber reflection on the day.

6. We’ve been running regular installments from Phil Cunningham’s forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon. Here is the first (that we’ve seen) review of it (at the Wall Street Journal).

7. Many of you have already seen this collection of writings at the New York Times, but in case you haven’t it’s worth reading. It includes pieces by Xiao Qiang, Woeser, Persian Xiaozhao, Jeff Wasserstrom, and others.

8. At The Guardian’s “comment is free,” Timothy Garton Ash discusses the divergent paths captured in 1989’s big historical moments.

9. And, on a related note, lest we think that 6/4 is the only news of the moment, The Times, has a list of June’s “six world-altering anniversaries.”

6/4 Around the World

Last August, we called on contributors and friends of the blog around the world to send in short reports on how the Olympics were being covered and received in their neck of the woods. Recently, we sent out a similar call regarding today’s anniversary. Here are a few of the responses we’ve received so far, pulled together into a piece that we think would make for interesting reading beside the very different "around the world" survey that David Flumenbaum has done and will keep updated over at the Huffington Post. Included here are some comments by people who contributed to our "Olympics Around the World" feature or have written for China Beat on other things before. We'll link to those earlier pieces when listing their names below, and are also pleased to welcome a couple of newcomers to the mix, people whose writings have been mentioned on the site, but who have not written for us before.

James Farrer, Tokyo
My daily paper in Tokyo, the Asahi Shimbun (Japanese language version), has been running a series of very prominent articles all week on June 4th. One article that caught my eye on June 1 was an attempt to systematically track down and account for the most prominent leaders of the 1989 student movement. The article featured an informative chart with names and summary accounts of 21 former student leaders, seven of whom stayed in China and 14 of whom left the country. With the exception of Wuerkaixi, who lives in Taiwan, it seems all the others are in the US. None seem to have any connection to Japan or significant stays in Japan.

The article on June 1, as well as the article today (June 4), features interviews with Wuerkaixi, who lives in Taiwan with his Taiwanese wife, and works for a US company. Today, it is reported that he was refused entry to Macau, and was held up at the Macau airport before returning to Taiwan. He was travelling on a Taiwanese travel document. He reported that he had not seen his family in twenty years. Otherwise, there was a first-hand report about a group of former student leaders and some current activists who meet regularly in Beijing to discuss reforms, a story about the Tiananmen Mothers, and a story about Zhao Ziyang's book. I have not noticed any large public events or ceremonies involving June 4th here in Japan, but it may be that I am not following the right news. (I don't regularly watch TV....)

In general the coverage in the Asahi Shimbun is similar in tone to a liberal US paper, with articles primarily focusing on the voices of former activists. There is a wistful tone, a sense not only of lost possibilities but of a lost era of political hopefulness and, on a more personal level, of lost youth. The event is slipping into history much faster than we imagined it would.

Paola Voci, New Zealand
I will be watching for anything more in the news tonight, but so far very little in the mainstream media here in New Zealand. The largest newspapers obviously have some coverage of the 20th anniversary, but they are AP Reuters pieces ; TVNZ broadcast a BBC video on this topic. Even when included, it is never the first item in the world news (the AirFrance plane gets much more coverage). I am not sure whether something might be going on now in Auckland and Wellington. We will know tomorrow if any public event has taken place in these larger cities.

Here in Dunedin, 4 June is a day like all others.

Because today was my last lecture, I decided that at least I had to check how many of my students knew about what happened 20 years ago (of course many students were not even born then!). To my relief, only a couple had no idea about what 4 June and the Tiananmen Square protest meant. Most had some sort of knowledge that "a protest took place and people died". We took some time in class to just go over some of the basic facts, some of the issues and the relevance that they still have in today's China. That was my very small contribution to keep the memory of this tragic event alive and stimulate some discussion on its significance...

Chinese students associations on campus (either from mainland or Taiwan) do not seem to have organized anything to commemorate the event. At least nothing visible. But, the day is not over yet...

Since I came to live here, I felt that for NZ, China has a rather strange proximity and remoteness. Yet, I was expecting a little more discussion about China in the media today...to match at least some of the interest that the Olympics were able to inspire. But, at least so far, it seems as though, even without any CCP intervention, June 4 has been forgotten in NZ.

Steve Smith, Italy
In today’s La Repubblica, Italy’s second largest national newspaper and one with a left-of-centre bent, there is an interesting article by the award-winning journalist, Federico Rampini, who heads the Beijing bureau of the newspaper. It’s entitled ‘The Mystery of the Youth who Challenged the Tanks at Tiananmen’ and begins with a vivid description of the iconic footage, taken by photographers in the Beijing Hotel, in which a young man, jacket dangling from his left hand and clutching two plastic bags of shopping in his right, holds up the tanks rolling down Chang’an Avenue.

“The scene”, Rampini writes, “seems unreal. The tanks are stopped one after the other in Indian file by this slender figure who seems to dominate them. The driver of the first armoured tank makes a manoeuvre, trying to drive around the young man from the right. But he appears in front of them once more, extending his arms as if he is taming a wild beast. The young man then takes a leap and climbs on to the tank to talk to the soldier who is visible through the tank grille. ‘Turn back! Stop killing our people!’ is the cry that witnesses remember him exclaiming. Then it is over in a flash: the young man gets down from the tank and friends surround him in order to allow him to escape.”

Rampini begins his reflections by asking what happened to this youth. He talks to Xu Youyu徐友漁, liberal dissident and a signatory of Charter 08 (零八宪章) who explains that many feared he had been arrested or killed, but that in the twenty years since the event legends of all kinds have grown up around him, notably one that he had plastic surgery to avoid discovery. If Xu knows more than this, and Rampini implies that he does, he is not telling.

This, however, is just a spur for Rampini to go on to reflect on how the incident shed light on the strategy of repression pursued by the authorities both during and after the Tiananmen events, in respect of whom they targeted and how they targeted them. The young man was lucky to escape because he was close to Tiananmen, the sacred centre of Communist power. According to Xu, heaps of bodies crushed by tanks could be seen in districts further from the centre such as Fuxingmen and Muxidi, giving a certain ironic half-truth to the claim of the authorities that “no one was killed in Tiananmen.”

The crucial point made, however, is that repression came about not only in the form of 700 to 3000 killings that occurred during the suppression of the insurgency, but also in the form of arrests, condemnations and deportations during the months that followed. Lists of those most wanted and those who must be blacklisted from employment circulated in all work units. Zhang Boshu 张博树, another signatory of Charter 08, recalls that he was lucky because he was not a member of the CCP, since party branches were under particular pressure to turn over members who had been involved in the protests to the security organs. Zhang believes that party members sympathetic to Zhao Ziyang were a particular object of detestation for Deng Xiaoping, who accused him of having split the party in two.

Rampini stresses the very different fates that awaited worker and student protestors. As early as 8 June, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau arrested 13 workers, three of whom were immediately shot by a firing squad. Of the 48 public executions that took place in Beijing in succeeding days not a single one was a student. According to Rampini, “the grand operation to bring about the recovery of the elite had got underway, the long march to coopt intellectuals and students had begun.” The lesson that Communist leaders learned, he suggests, was that they must never again find themselves opposed to the most educated and modern section of society. He ends by quoting Zhang to the effect that twenty years on, there is no alternative force to the CCP on the horizon: “There does not exist a movement that could lead a peaceful transition to democracy. It is from within the Communist party that this push for change must come.”

Prasenjit Duara, Singapore
Straits Times, June 4, 2009 has an op-ed by Goh Sui Noi --"Legacy of June 4 leaves grounds for optimism"--which argues that June 4 has left a good legacy for development of democracy in China--both from supply side of ex-activists and demand from the ignorant young students. [Editor’s note: You must be a subscriber to the Straits Times to access this piece, but here is the synopsis from the website: “Professor Huang Jing's class of 17 students at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy swelled to more than 30 earlier this year on the day he taught about the June 4th incident.”]

Mark Magnier, India
There was relatively little coverage or evident interest in the Tiananmen anniversary in India. Television largely ignored it, preferring to focus instead on Obama’s speech to the Islamic world and a local medical school scandal. A few newspapers ran op-eds by China specialists and a couple of publications with China correspondents had articles buried well back in the paper on how China was battening down its hatches for the 20^th . But that was about all I saw.

One of the more interesting pieces I saw was an editorial in Mint, a progressive business paper. In an item entitled “Tiananmen: 20 years later,” the paper discussed the link between political and economic freedom, concluding that, while China may be hoping to create a new model of the latter without the former, in the end they must go hand in hand. “The Communist Party, it would seem, is now trying to delay the day when these contradictory elements are forced into a synthesis,” it wrote. “But without the vent democracy offers citizen grouses, this synthesis can only be a violently unstable one.”

James Farrer is Director of the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University.

Paola Voci is a senior lecturer in the Chinese programme at the University of Otago.

Steve Smith is a professor of history at the University of Essex and is currently teaching at the European University Institute in Florence.

Prasenjit Duara is Director of Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore.

Mark Magnier is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and is now bureau chief for the Times in New Delhi.