Category Archives: China

Slate provides a short history of Chinese restaurants in the U.S.

“Have You Eaten Yet?,” the wonderful Chinese restaurants exhibit now on view at New York’s Museum of Chinese in the Americas, takes a Babel of ephemera and makes it speak. One’s visit begins with an absence: the never-photographed first Chinese eateries in America, known as “chow chows,” which sprang up in California in the mid-19th century to serve Cantonese laborers….

According to Chinese Restaurant News, there are now more Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonald’s franchises–nearly three times as many in fact. In the 19th century, though, the Chinese were scorned as rat-eaters; nothing could have been more revolting than eating what they ate….

Happily, change was on its way. The 1965 liberalization of immigration laws brought new arrivals and new food, from Sichuan and Hunan and Shanghai. Multiculturalism and Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, meanwhile, inspired an “authenticity revolution”—a transformation further fueled by a changing clientele. Charles Lai, the director of the museum, recalls wandering into a Chinatown restaurant as a boy in the ’60s and realizing that everyone else in the place was white. “I felt like, what am I doing here?” he says. But no more: Today, Chinese and Chinese Americans are important customers, as are other Asians and Asian Americans, and some restaurants are once again catering to newly arrived workers. How “authentic” they are, though, depends on how you define “authentic.” “It is and isn’t a return to the way things were at the beginning,” says Lee. She points out that with globalization, food is changing quickly even in Asia; what constitutes Chinese food is evolving.

via Arts & Letters Daily

In yesterday’s New York Times, reporter Joseph Kahn reminds us of possible similarities between China’s current anti-Japanese demonstrations and those 86 years ago.

The Communist Party stirs patriotic feelings to underpin its legitimacy at a time when few, even in its own ranks, put much faith in Marxism. Official propaganda and the national education system stress the indignities suffered at the hands of foreign powers from the mid-19th century through World War II. Japan, which China says killed or wounded 35 million Chinese from 1937 through 1945, gets the most attention….

But China has never made nationalism the driving force of its foreign policy. The government mainly emphasizes its desire to have a “peaceful rise” that does not impinge on its neighbors, and the authorities are nervous about disrupting the flow of investment and technology that has powered economic growth.

Moreover, anti-Japan protests have a long and, for the government, a sobering history. A student-led march on May 4, 1919, to protest the decision by World War I Allied powers that allowed Japan to take over Germany’s colonial territories in China spawned Chinese resistance against Western colonialism. But the May 4 movement and uprisings in 1931 and 1937 turned against the government.

“My impression is that the well-educated elite in China are genuinely baffled and upset by how long the government has tolerated provocations from Japan,” said Wenran Jiang, an expert on China-Japan relations at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “Every anti-Japan movement has sooner or later turned against the government.”…

But a senior editor at a party newspaper says the persistence of the anti-Japan campaign and the participation of urban professionals has alarmed the authorities. Officials are accustomed to dealing with unrest among peasants and workers who feel defrauded or disenfranchised by China’s economic boom, not among the urban elite, who are its primary beneficiaries.

“The white-collar middle class is supposed to be a pillar of stability,” the editor said.

On the other hand, maybe they are now the only ones who have the luxury of fighting about ideology and international status, rather than more material issues.

Postwar Taiwan is difficult to categorize: is it a nation, a province, or some combination of the two? The case studies of Taiwanese reactions to Nationalist rule contained in this chapter raise still another possibility: a colony. Although even the suggestion of colonialism is politically sensitive, colonialism merits discussion because it captures the complexity of the Taiwanese interaction with the Nationalists and forms part of the ideological underpinning for the independence movement today. Since retrocession, when islanders compared Japanese and Nationalist policies, aspects of colonialism were not defined in any abstract sense, but by the similarities between the pre- and post-1945 administrations.

One common way of describing colonial rule is the model of core and periphery. The metropole is the core, which dominates and exploits the less developed periphery. A variation of this model is the notion of internal colonialism developed by Michael Hechter. Essentially, Hechter places the core-periphery paradigm within one nation-state; in his case study, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots within the United Kingdom. He writes that a “spatially uneven wave of modernization over a state territory creates relatively advanced and less advanced groups.” Hechter points out that the core has economic dominance and political control, and practices “national discrimination on the basis of language, religion or other cultural forms.” The core uses its political power to maintain its advantages, much as a colonial power seeks through direct or indirect rule to dominate a colony. “Disadvantaged groups,” Hechter notes, “are likely to demand that decision-making be ‘localized’ so that their special problem might become appreciated and therefore taken into account in the allocation process.” This describes the goals of the Taiwanese elite.

However, to describe Taiwan as a colony or internal colony under Nationalist rule is problematic. First, this peripheral island was more advanced economically than the mainland. Second, immigrants from the mainland after 1945 were more exiles than colonists. Furthermore, the government struggled to prove that the local population was culturally, politically, and historically one and the same with mainlanders. The Nationalists never thought of themselves as colonizers, and in fact based their legitimacy on a claim of restoring Chinese rule to the island. This idea was even embedded in language, as retrocession (guangfu) became the term used by the Nationalists to describe their takeover of the island after the war. To the Nationalists, three factors “proved” Taiwan was not a colony: international law (the Cairo Declaration returned the island to China), intent (mainlanders did not seek to make Taiwan a colony), and policies (government measures were designed for the entire nation). Specific programs such as local self-government represented the fulfillment of long-term goals for China, not a specific colonial policy.

Nevertheless, when examining the island’s elite, the model of Taiwan as a colony has some validity. The various positions taken by Taiwanese vis-à-vis the Nationalist state, and the divisions among prominent islanders, had many similarities to the pre-1945 colonial experience. As these case studies illustrate, most islanders found ways to reconcile their personal, professional, and political aspirations with the reality of Japanese, then Nationalist, control without resorting to violence. This is not to gloss over the brutality of Jiang Jieshi’s [= Chiang Kai-shek’s] police state…. However, the authoritarianism of the Nationalist regime constituted just one of many factors that shaped the provincial elite’s relationship with the government. Continuing a trend initiated during the Japanese period, many islanders participated in an impotent system of local self-government even as they tried to reform it. Although the Nationalists preferred to have the support of islanders, they were satisfied if Taiwanese simply avoided all political activity and did not openly oppose the regime …

Terms like assimilation and independence do not convey the complexity of the Taiwanese understanding of their place in China and the Republic of China. Most islanders hoped to find a modus vivendi that fell between these two ends of a continuum–usually articulated as a drive for expanded local self-government. In the same way, the term colonialism is too simple and does not fully explain the reality of Nationalist policies on the island, even if the Taiwanese elite reacted like a people living under colonial rule. Perhaps this lack of clarity is to be expected in postwar Taiwan. The advocacy of local self-government, itself an ambiguous concept whose meaning shifted over time, corresponds to this situation just as nationalism can be a reaction to “pure” colonialism. Ultimately, Taiwan is best understood by examining the complex interaction of all three of these seemingly contradictory elements: nation, province, and colony. After the Nationalists’ defeat on the mainland, Taiwan represented a nation with a state that insisted it was a province, and the Taiwanese were a people whose political activity suggested they were living in a colony. Ironically, the real colonizers were the Han Chinese immigrants to the island during the late Ming and Qing periods who had conquered Taiwan and subdued the aboriginal peoples–the first Taiwanese. This fact, like so much of the island’s history, was conveniently forgotten by Han Taiwanese and mainlanders alike.

SOURCE: Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945-1950, by Steven E. Phillips (Stanford U. Press, 2003), pp. 136-139

For most historians, China’s significant influence in Eastern Europe after Stalin’s death began with its role in solving political crises there in October and November 1956. Briefly speaking, when Moscow decided to put down the Polish workers’ uprising in mid-October 1956 by using force, Beijing opposed the decision on the grounds that the Polish problem was caused mainly by “big-power chauvinism” (referring to Moscow’s arrogance and interference in the domestic affairs of other countries) instead of Western antisocialist conspiracy. [In contrast], when Moscow was wavering between using force and a hands-off policy in face of the Hungarian crisis at the very end of October, Beijing urged Moscow to send its troops into Budapest. According to some Chinese sources made available in the late 1990s, from 19 to 31 October 1965, a time in which the Polish-Hungarian crisis reached its peak, communication and discussion between Moscow and Beijing were unusually constant and intense….

The most critical moments came on 29 and 30 October. On the evening of 29 October, Khrushchev and other Russian leaders met the Chinese in their residence and told them both Poland and Hungary were asking Moscow to withdraw its army from their countries. While insisting Moscow should change its “big-power chauvinism” attitude toward other communist countries, Liu Shaoqi said that under current circumstances it would be better for the Soviet army to remain and combat the antirevolutionaries. During the conversation the Chinese delegation received a call from Mao, whose suggestion was different from Liu’s. Mao said that it was the time for Moscow to withdraw its army from the two countries and let them be independent. Liu accepted Mao’s suggestion and conveyed it to Khrushchev. The next day, however, the Chinese delegation received a situation report from the Soviet leadership. The report was written by Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet first deputy premier and skillful communicator between Moscow and other communist states, who had been sent to Hungary before the Chinese delegation arrived in Moscow. The report stated that since 29 October, with the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Budapest and dissolution of the Hungarian security force, the Hungarian capital and many other parts of the country had been in chaos, and antirevolutionaries were killing communists. The Chinese delegation was taken by surprise. After a whole day of discussion, they concluded that the nature of the Hungarian development was different from that of the Polish, so the Soviet army needed to reenter the capital and crush the antirevolutionaries. Then in the evening Liu Shaoqi called Mao. Mao changed his earlier stand that the Russians should leave and agreed with the delegation’s conclusion, because, in addition to Liu’s report, he had been receiving daily situation reports from Hungary written by Ho Deqing, the Chinese ambassador, and Hu Jibang, chief correspondent of the People’s Daily in Budapest. But he said it would be better if the Russians would wait a while to let more antirevolutionaries expose themselves–a typical Maoist tactic later on used to smoke out China’s Rightists. After calling Mao, the Chinese requested an emergency meeting with the Russians. In the meeting, Liu Shaoqi, vice chairman of the CCP’s central committee, strongly suggested that Khrushchev not “give up” in Hungary but make more efforts to save the situation, while Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the CCP, explicitly urged that the Russian army return to the capital and seize the government. But Khrushchev was hesitant. He told the Chinese that since the situation had changed considerably in Hungary, the return of the Russian army would mean an occupation of the country and the Russians would be regarded as conquerors. Therefore Soviet leadership, Khrushchev told the Chinese, had decided not to send its troops back. Since the Russians had made the decision, the Chinese did not go further to assert their opinions. Instead Liu said to the Russians, jokingly, that yesterday we tried to pursue you to withdraw but you did not agree; today you came and tried to pursue us to agree with your decision to withdraw. All people in the meeting laughed. Then Liu told the Russians that the Chinese delegation would return to Beijing the next evening. But the next evening, 31 October, the Chinese delegation received a call from the Kremlin just before departure for the airport. The Russian leaders asked the Chinese to arrive the airport one hour earlier than scheduled to have an emergency meeting. At the airport, the Chinese met Khrushchev and other Russian leaders. Khrushchev told them the Russian leadership had changed its mind overnight and decided to send troops back to Budapest. Excited, Liu Shaoqi said that the Chinese were glad that now the Russian leadership had taken a stand to defend socialism. In fact, before the airport meeting, the Russian army had already moved back toward the Hungarian capital.

Moscow’s vacillation, reflected in the Chinese account, in solving the Hungarian crisis may be confirmed by Khrushchev’s own statement: “I don’t know how many times [we changed our minds] about whether to get out of Hungary or ‘crush the mutiny.’” It is difficult to decide exactly to what extent Beijing influenced Moscow in making decisions, but as the above Chinese account shows, the Chinese did play some role in the process and the Russians did take China’s attitude seriously. On 3 November 1956, three days after Russian tanks rumbled into Budapest, China’s People’s Daily was one of the earliest communist papers worldwide to hail the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolt. China further endorsed the political change in Hungary by sending Zhou Enlai, its premier, to the still-smoldering Budapest in mid-January 1957, where Zhou’s residence (although he stayed there for only one day) had to be guarded by Soviet tanks.

SOURCE: Yinghong Cheng, “Beyond Moscow-Centric Interpretation: An Examination of the China Connection in Eastern Europe and North Vietnam during the Era of De-Stalinization,” Journal of World History 15:487-518 (Project Muse subscription required).

In order to obtain more autonomy from Moscow [after the death of Stalin], some Eastern European countries turned to Beijing for inspiration under the pretext that China was in the stage of socialist transition (from the “New Democracy” to socialism) similar to that of Eastern Europe, whereas the Soviet Union had entered a much higher stage of socialist construction….

In Hungary, the Chinese influence was reflected in the ideology of emerging Hungarian nationalist communists, particularly in Imre Nagy’s admiration of China’s Five Principles of coexistence [especially nonintervention]. Nagy, who was purged during Stalin’s later years, rehabilitated during the New Course, and appointed as Hungarian premier from late 1953 to 1955, proposed his reformist line that included easing the tempo of industrialization, allowing peasants to leave collective farms, and relaxing police terror. For this he was ousted in March 1955 by Hungarian Stalinists led by Matyas Rakosi….

After the CPSU’s Twentieth Congress, with the discrediting of Stalinist policies coming into air, China became more attractive in Eastern Europe, and China’s activities promoting its influence became more aggressive. Marked by the publication of “Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let One Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” a policy report made by Lu Dingyi, the head of the propaganda department of the CCP, in May 1956 and published by People’s Daily on 13 June, China initiated an intellectual liberalization aimed at releasing accumulated internal pressures in the short run, with a long-run purpose of allowing some flexibility and criticism within the regime in order to win popular support and detect mistakes. The Double-Hundred policy soon became a new focus of the Chinese attractiveness in Eastern Europe. In September the CCP’s Eighth Congress opened, and all Eastern European communist parties sent delegations to Beijing. The event was used by Beijing at that critical moment to introduce its own road toward socialism and to build up relations with the post-Stalinist generation among Eastern European leaders. For example, Janos Kadar, the head of the Hungarian delegation, who was purged during Stalin’s years but rehabilitated in 1954, was very popular in the Hungarian party for his anti-Stalinist stand. Chinese leaders were very interested in this emerging new leader, and Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Zhou Enlai all had long conversations with him. On 1 October Kadar once again represented the Hungarian party at the celebration of China’s National Day in Beijing.

One point that has not received adequate attention on the Double-Hundred policy is that the metaphoric expression (directly from Mao himself and characteristic of his style) created a false impression of tolerating various–if not all–ideological opinions, especially among those who were unfamiliar with the CCP’s ideologically oppressive past, such as the Yenan Rectification in the 1940s and the Thought Reform Campaign in the early 1950s. This was particularly the case when the Double-Hundred policy aroused widespread pro-Chinese sympathy in Eastern Europe, where people were excited by the slogan itself but did not have adequate knowledge about the CCP’s history and had no chance to scrutinize the specific contents of the Chinese materials introducing the new policy. In Hungary the Chinese ambassador took the opportunity to enhance pro-Chinese sentiment by providing more information to Hungarian intellectuals and students, and he even made a special effort to publicize the CCP’s Eighth Congress, which opened in September and confirmed the Double-Hundred policy, by supplying abundant information to Hungarian press and radio. As a result, the CCP’s Eighth Congress was given a great deal of publicity by Hungarian media, which further nourished the pro-Chinese sentiment. Many dissenting Hungarian intellectuals came to believe that the Double-Hundred policy truly reflected the intention of the Chinese communists. In the meantime, with Nagy’s rehabilitation and reappointment as premier, China’s Five Principles of coexistence were used against Soviet “big-power chauvinism”–a term also coined by the Chinese. The Hungarian illusion of China lasted until the last minute, when Irodalmi Ujsag (Literary gazette; the organ of the revolutionary writers) declared on 2 November (two days after China urged Khrushchev to crush the Hungarian revolt) that “The West and the East are on our side. America has proclaimed her faith in our cause as clearly as have powerful nations like China and India.” (emphasis added)

SOURCE: Yinghong Cheng, “Beyond Moscow-Centric Interpretation: An Examination of the China Connection in Eastern Europe and North Vietnam during the Era of De-Stalinization,” Journal of World History 15:487-518 (Project Muse subscription required).

THE YEARS 1956 and 1957 marked the first serious crisis in global communism during the Cold War with many significant events. Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956 revealing Stalin’s crimes shocked the communist world and initiated a course of de-Stalinization, which soon led to challenges to the communist system itself, as the revolts in Poland and Hungary in October and November 1956 demonstrated. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, although violent eruption of political protest was largely absent, inner party debates and intellectual dissent were common, accompanied by sporadic strikes of workers and students. In Asian communist countries, the intellectual dissent and criticism of the party became conspicuous in China, especially in the spring of 1957, during the Double-Hundred movement and the Rectification period, with a few cases of workers’ strikes and student protests. In North Vietnam the intellectuals directly challenged the party during the so-called Nhan Van/Giai Pham (the names of two journals critical of the party) period in the fall of 1956, coupled with the peasant rebellion in Nghe-An Province and turbulence in the cities. The Hungarian revolution was suppressed in November 1956, and the entire atmosphere of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe underwent dramatic change. As Chinese intellectuals were still encouraged to criticize the party in the spring of 1957, Vietnamese intellectuals resumed their criticism of the regime as well. In June 1957, however, China launched the anti-Rightist campaign and ended the so-called “liberalization,” and so did Vietnam after the new year of 1958. Thus a cross-communist world crisis was overcome….

This article examines the process of de-Stalinization, or liberalization, from a perspective based on the China connection in Eastern Europe and Vietnam, which has been either underestimated or left out in many Moscow-centric narratives. The term “China connection” means either a direct Chinese influence or parallels between these countries and China. The article presents and connects two cases. The first is the Chinese influence in some Eastern European countries, and even the Soviet Union as well, from 1955 to 1958. The second is Vietnamese intellectuals’ challenge to the regime and the regime’s response, both of which show interesting parallels between the two countries. The China connection in both the Eastern European and the Vietnamese cases clearly indicates a different source contributing to de-Stalinization and even suggests an expanded time frame of such turbulence from as early as 1955 (before Khrushchev’s secret report) to as late as 1958 (one year after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising), thus enriching our understanding of the global communist crisis with broader sources and longer duration.

SOURCE: Yinghong Cheng, “Beyond Moscow-Centric Interpretation: An Examination of the China Connection in Eastern Europe and North Vietnam during the Era of De-Stalinization,” Journal of World History 15:487-518 (Project Muse subscription required).

This is the kind of article that just makes you keep slapping your forehead in recognition of suddenly obvious connections among so many things you never tied together before. It’s the best kind of historical revisionism and a wonderful illustration of the value of taking a global view of the diffusion of ideas across national boundaries.

Economic (and big-picture) historian Niall Ferguson has published an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (reprinted on RealClearPolitics) on the possibility of a second round of deglobalization in the world economy, noting parallels to the situation before World War I.

The last age of globalization resembled the current one in numerous ways. It was characterized by relatively free trade, limited restrictions on migration, and hardly any regulation of capital flows. Inflation was low. A wave of technological innovation was revolutionizing the communications and energy sectors; the world first discovered the joys of the telephone, the radio, the internal combustion engine, and paved roads. The U.S. economy was the biggest in the world, and the development of its massive internal market had become the principal source of business innovation. China was opening up, raising all kinds of expectations in the West, and Russia was growing rapidly.

World War I wrecked all of this. Global markets were disrupted and disconnected, first by economic warfare, then by postwar protectionism. Prices went haywire: a number of major economies (Germany’s among them) suffered from both hyperinflation and steep deflation in the space of a decade. The technological advances of the 1900s petered out: innovation hit a plateau, and stagnating consumption discouraged the development of even existing technologies such as the automobile. After faltering during the war, overheating in the 1920s, and languishing throughout the 1930s in the doldrums of depression, the U.S. economy ceased to be the most dynamic in the world. China succumbed to civil war and foreign invasion, defaulting on its debts and disappointing optimists in the West. Russia suffered revolution, civil war, tyranny, and foreign invasion. Both these giants responded to the crisis by donning the constricting armor of state socialism. They were not alone. By the end of the 1940s, most states in the world, including those that retained political freedoms, had imposed restrictions on trade, migration, and investment as a matter of course. Some achieved autarky, the ideal of a deglobalized society. Consciously or unconsciously, all governments applied in peacetime the economic restrictions that had first been imposed between 1914 and 1918….

With the benefit of hindsight … five factors can be seen to have precipitated the global explosion of 1914-18. The first cause was imperial overstretch. By 1914, the British Empire was showing signs of being a “weary Titan,” in the words of the poet Matthew Arnold. It lacked the will to build up an army capable of deterring Germany from staging a rival bid for European hegemony (if not world power). As the world’s policeman, distracted by old and new commitments in Asia and Africa, the United Kingdom’s beat had simply become too big.

Great-power rivalry was another principal cause of the catastrophe. The problem was not so much Anglo-German rivalry at sea as it was Russo-German rivalry on land. Fear of a Russian arms buildup convinced the German general staff to fight in 1914 rather than risk waiting any longer.

The third fatal factor was an unstable alliance system. Alliances existed in abundance, but they were shaky. The Germans did not trust the Austrians to stand by them in a crisis, and the Russians worried that the French might lose their nerve. The United Kingdom’s actions were impossible to predict because its ententes with France and Russia made no explicit provisions for the eventuality of war in Europe. The associated insecurities encouraged risk-taking diplomacy. In 1908, for example, Austria-Hungary brusquely annexed Bosnia. Three years later, the German government sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir to challenge French claims to predominance in Morocco.

The presence of a rogue regime sponsoring terror was a fourth source of instability. The chain of events leading to war, as every schoolchild used to know, began with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. There were shady links between the assassin’s organization and the Serbian government, which had itself come to power not long before in a bloody palace coup.

Finally, the rise of a revolutionary terrorist organization hostile to capitalism turned an international crisis into a backlash against the global free market. The Bolsheviks, who emerged from the 1903 split in the Russian Social Democratic Party, had already established their credentials as a fanatical organization committed to using violence to bring about world revolution. By straining the tsarist system to the breaking point, the war gave Lenin and his confederates their opportunity. They seized it and used the most ruthless terrorist tactics to win the ensuing civil war.