Category Archives: China

TMLutas of Flit(tm) cites a Stratfor article (only temporarily accessible) under the heading, Is the PRC Crashing?

Essentially the argument is that the PRC is making the same errors that every other Asian country has lived through. It is aided by the fact that its currency is nonconvertible but that’s no panacea. It is suffering from a plague of crony loans made to connected people who have hollowed out their economy. Essentially, we’re in the end stages of the PRC’s economic pyramid scheme.

The stakes are quite high. If the PRC falls into crisis, it is much less likely to survive than Japan and more likely to fracture into the traditional solution of warlord dominated regional entities.

While perusing the archives of the Muninn blog I recently discovered, I came across another interesting bit of historical detail posted on 26 March, which describes the content of the newspaper Shenbao in Shanghai in August 1945:

You pick up the most circulated newspaper in Shanghai on August 15th, 1945, the day of Japan’s surrender. What do you see? Well, the news of the surrender hasn’t made it for the day’s issue. Instead, in the days leading up to the end of the war the newspaper focuses on the Russian advances in Manchuria, or the arrival of B29 bombers attacking Japanese targets in China. Of course, you still see the usual advertisements for CPC Coffee, and various brands of penicillin. But how will the newspaper change in the next few days as Japan’s control over Shanghai comes to an end? While this wasn’t a question related to my research, it was at the back of my mind as I skimmed through an important Shanghai newspaper called 申報 from the second half of the year 1945….

CPC Coffee, which had long had very recognizable, if somewhat boring, advertisements depicting a can a coffee, finally join the victory bandwagon on the 21st by getting rid of the can image and replacing it with three victory slogans for the Allies, China, and Chiang Kai-shek. They scrap this on the 26th and add an image of a caucasian drinking coffee. Prices still look kind of inflated on the 26th. Meimei Si is selling coffee for 18,000 yuan and ‘Victory’ sundaes for 40,000. Also on the 26th we see the sudden appearance of radio channel advertisements, promising the latest news from San Francisco or India. Not far from Meimei Si’s victory sundaes is a very short article noting the mass suicide of a group of Japanese soldiers in front of the imperial palace. The editorial of the day emphasizes the need to preserve social order and reminds everyone that Chiang Kai-shek has ordered that no-one is to show hostility towards the surrendered Japanese soldiers. Thousands of them are still wandering around with their weapons, some have yet to officially hand over control of the cities they control. Most of them are not disarmed until weeks or months later and some of them end up helping one side or the other in the conflict to come. In these early postwar days, the KMT and the Communists are in a mad nation-wide rush to get their troops into each Japanese controlled area to accept the hand-over of power first. While the two sides were nominally allied during the war against the Japan, the country is on the verge of a new civil war between the two. In the first few weeks, however, we see Mao and Chiang inviting each other to tea parties and banquets.

Why are there so many writing systems in India and and so few in China? In 1994, Victor H. Mair addressed this question in an article in the Journal of Asian Studies. Here’s the abstract.

The premise of Victor H. Mair’s wide-ranging article is that written Chinese emerged not as transcribed speech, but rather as a special, radically shortened cipher with its own grammatical and expressive conventions. He calls this written form Literary Sinitic (LS) and finds the disparity between it and any form of spoken Chinese, which he refers to under the general heading of Vernacular Sinitic (VS), is of a wholly different nature than the contrast between written Latin and any modern written or spoken Romance language. Indeed, he argues, Literary Sinitic remained incapable of serving as a means of recording spoken Chinese or any other language. Thus, for Mair, the question becomes: How did vernacular written forms emerge in a milieu in which Literary Sinitic dominated intellectual life? He finds the earliest instances of written Vernacular Sinitic occur typically in Buddhist texts. He believes the Buddhist emphasis on teaching through the local dialect (desa bhasa) was a major impetus for the development of written vernacular, but concludes it is difficult to determine exactly which aspects of Buddhism had the greatest influence on the slow maturation of written Vernacular Sinitic.

And here’s Mair’s conclusion.

We have seen how, under the probable influence of the Indian concept of desa bhasa brought to China by Buddhism, numerous peoples in East Asia created a whole series of written vernaculars. While Chinese authorities stubbornly resisted recognition of any of their own vernaculars as a national language–probably due to the extremely high prestige and power of LS–the Buddhists used the vernacular liberally in their own writings. Once proffered as a functional alternative written language, use of the vernacular steadily grew until, by the late Ming-early Ch’ing [= Qing], it is likely that as many books were being printed in vernacular or a heavily vernacularized literary style as in LS, not withstanding the censure and ridicule of strait-laced scholars. Finally, even the Manchus, who already had their own written national language, which was swiftly dying out because of pervasive sinicization, yielded to the idea that their Sinitic subjects, too, needed a national language keyed to one of the spoken vernaculars. After the agitation of the May Fourth Movement [in 1919] led by progressive Chinese intellectuals and students, many of whom were exposed to radical ideas about language and other aspects of culture and society through the window of Japan, kuo-yü [= guoyu, Mandarin] was publicly proclaimed the official written language of the nation. This marked the formal end of the multimillennial separation between book language (shu-mien-yü [= shumianyu]) and spoken language (k’ou-yü [= kouyu]) in China.

That Buddhism played a crucial role in the evolution of the written vernacular throughout East Asia is beyond any doubt. The question remains, however: Which aspect of Buddhism was responsible for these momentous changes? Was there some religious doctrine belonging to Buddhism that fostered the written vernacular? Was it the fondness for storytelling, preaching, and public speaking by the early Buddhists in the language of the people? Did the ostensible orality of Buddhist scripture have anything to do with the origins of the written vernacular in China? Was the fact that most of the early translators of Buddhist texts into Sinitic were foreigners with a poor command of the literary language a significant factor? And did the phonological sophistication of Indian linguistical science lend credibility to the spoken vis-à-vis the written? What of the elaborate, rigorously defined Indian traditions of chanting and recitation? And may the social values, institutions, and position of Buddhism have contributed to the rise of the written vernaculars? Last but not least, did Buddhist practice have anything to do with the validation of the vernacular? Perhaps I have entirely overlooked some vital facet of Buddhism that contributed to this process. In the end, Buddhist support for the written vernacular may best be identified as a complex combination of diverse factors, all of which were determined by an integrated socioreligous ideology.

SOURCE: Victor H. Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1994): 705, 707-751

UPDATE: The comment thread on this at Language Hat is most interesting.

In the 16 & 23 February issue of The New Yorker, Peter Hessler’s “Letter From China” (not available online) hints at how close the PRC came to abandoning Chinese characters for an alphabet.

In 1936, as the Communists were gaining power, Mao Zedong told an American journalist that alphabetization was inevitable. When Mao finally took control of China, in 1949, many expected the government to replace characters with Latin letters, as Vietnam had done earlier in the century. But in the summer of 1950 Mao handed down a surprise decision, calling for linguists to develop a “national-in-form” alphabet–a new writing system, whose letters would be distinctively Chinese.

John DeFrancis, a linguist at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, has studied this period, and he told me that the inspiration for Mao’s order has always been a mystery. DeFrancis recommended that I speak with Zhou Yougang, a ninety-seven-year-old linguist who had worked on the writing reform committee … [which] considered more than two thousand proposed writing systems. Some were derived entirely from Chinese; others used Latin or Cyrillic alphabets; a few combined fragments of Chinese characters with foreign letters. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic…. In 1955, the committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists: Latin, Cyrillic, and four completely new “Chinese” systems….

In 1956, Mao and other leaders concluded that the Chinese alphabets weren’t yet usable. They sanctioned the Latin scheme, known as Pinyin, for use in early education and other special purposes, but not as a replacement script. And they decided to simplify a number of Chinese characters. This was described as an “initial reform stage”: Mao, it seems, wanted more time to consider the options.

But writing reform soon became entangled in politics. In April of 1957, the Communist Party launched the Hundred Flowers campaign, during which intellectuals were invited to speak their minds, however critical…. Then, after only five weeks, Mao abruptly terminated the … campaign. By the end of the year, more than three hundred thousand intellectuals had been labelled Rightists….

I asked Zhou what had happened to the four Chinese alphabets, and he told me that all records had apparently been destroyed. “It was easy to lose things like that during the Cultural Revolution,” he said.

The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, represents the climax of China’s disillusionment with its traditions. But, ironically, the upheaval helped protect the characters. When the chaos finally ended, the Chinese no longer had an appetite for radical cultural change, and both the public and the government rejected further attempts at writing reform. Today, almost nobody advocates alphabetization, and Zhou predicts that China won’t give up its characters for at least another century, if ever. Even the simplificiation didn’t get very far. It reduced the number of brushstrokes that make up some of the most commonly used characters, but the principles of the writing system remain the same. Essentially, it’s the equivalent of converting an English word like “through” to “thru.” Zhou and others believe that simplification hasn’t had a significant effect on improving literacy rates. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many overseas Chinese communities don’t use the simplified system, and traditionalists despise them.

In hindsight, Mao’s 1950 command doomed writing reform; without the search for a national-in-form alphabet, China likely would have adopted Latin script before the Cultural Revolution. When I asked about Mao, Zhou said that the turning point was the Chairman’s first state visit to the Soviet Union, in 1949. “Mao asked Stalin for advice about writing reform,” Zhou said. “Stalin told him, ‘You’re a great country, and you should have your own Chinese form of writing. You shouldn’t simply use the Latin alphabet.’ That’s why Mao wanted a national-in-form alphabet.”

NOTE: The impetus to blog this (after losing track of it) came from reading a post on the fascinating blog Muninn (discovered via Language Hat) about Chinese character reform in Taiwan, where both Chiang Kai-shek and a solid majority of Taiwanese favored it as late as 1954. I wonder if it was abruptly abandoned precisely because Mao adopted it after letting alphabetization–and any intellectuals who opined about it–fall by the wayside.

On 11 April, Erik Eckholm reported in the New York Times on political progress in China measured by Yardsticks You Never Thought of:

5. YUPPIE POLITICS The pressures for reform may flare most powerfully not from the downtrodden, but from the new, property-owning middle class, which will demand accountability from officials.

In 2003, the most vociferous illegal demonstrations in Beijing were staged not by desperate workers but by young professionals who said they had been cheated by developers of their apartment complex, abetted by local officials….

7. HUMAN RIGHTS FOR DOGS, AND VICE VERSA This is no joke. Visitors to Beijing and other big cities may notice an eerie absence of dogs on balmy weekend afternoons. This is not because they are regularly eaten; in fact, the Chinese love their pet dogs as much as any people anywhere. But because of outdated and draconian laws, tens of thousands of pet owners in Beijing alone must keep their dogs in the closet, as it were.

In Beijing, dogs are not allowed outside in the daytime; those caught outdoors are confiscated and killed. They are not allowed in parks, on grass or on elevators – even when elderly owners live on the 14th floor. They may not grow taller than knee-high, on pain of death. And licenses are expensive.

(Xiexie ni, Andrés Gentry!)

David Bello, the author of several works on opium in Qing-dynasty China, has an interesting revisionist take on the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60) that results from looking at the whole expanding Chinese empire and not just at where that empire intersected with the expanding British empire.

The opium-smuggling trade that Britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China’s century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers’ advent on the Chinese coast have become almost inextricably linked. Opium, however, was not strictly a Sino-British problem geographically confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, a transimperial crisis that spread among an ethnically diverse populace and created regionally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.

Bello notes that opium was a problem for the whole Qing (Manchu) realm, at least as much on its expanding interior borders as in its coastal cities. (He has a book coming out in 2005 in the Harvard East Asian Monographs series under the title Opium and the Limits of Empire: The Opium Problem in the Chinese Interior, 1729-1850.)

The Manchu empire had been rapidly growing, especially under the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736-95), during which China extended its control into Turkestan (part of which remains in Xinjiang), Burma, and Tibet. This imperial expansion was financed by transferring more money from farflung localities into central coffers, forcing cash-starved local and regional officials to seek alternative sources of income.

By the end of the 1830s at the latest, southwestern opium cultivation had become a part of the network of informal funding that had arisen since the 1720s to compensate for the diversion of revenue from locality to center.

In this manner, the state itself became addicted to opium, and this dependency was a primary reason for the failure of central government prohibition in many interior localities. From the state’s perspective, the opium problem ultimately concerned revenue, both in Qing China, which was spurred to action only by its conviction that drug consumption was responsible for a hemorrhage of silver abroad, and in British India, which also made a futile attempt to prohibit “illicit” production and trafficking in order to protect its own state monopoly. Opium, in the form of economic and political power, was as psychologically compelling to merchant-capitalists, bureaucrats, and politicians as it was physiologically compelling to drug consumers.

SOURCE: David Bello, “The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62:1109-1142.

NOTES:

1. “In 1881 the inspector general of customs in Shanghai, Sir Robert Hart, reported that imperial consumption of native opium equaled that of foreign imports. Most of the reports on which he based this conclusion identified the southwest, particularly Sichuan, as the main source of native opium” (Bello, p. 1134, n. 24)
2. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a geographer at CNRS argues in an article in Crime and International Justice 15 (1999), that opium production in today’s Golden Triangle in modern Burma, Laos, and Thailand dates no further back than to the end of the 18th century and that it only began to supply the worldwide market after elements of the Kuomintang took refuge in 1949-50. Since that time the opium industry in the Burma Triangle has only grown as various governments in the region, including Myanmar, have made efforts to reduce or eradicate opium production.

China-based blogger Andrés Gentry calls attention to a recent New York Times report that Zhao Ziyang is ill.

This should be getting more play in the China-blog community…. Why is that important?

… lower-level party officials, or students or intellectuals outside the party, may make Mr. Zhao’s death an occasion to press for political liberalization. China’s long tradition of paying homage to the dead makes it unseemly for the police to repress mourners, potentially opening a window for people to express grievances along with condolences.

In fact, the 1989 demonstrations first gathered steam after the death of the reform-minded leader who preceded Mr. Zhao as Communist Party chief, Hu Yaobang, who died 15 years ago this month.

“It is clear that leaders will have taken every measure to prevent any protests from happening,” said one Chinese political analyst who asked not to be quoted by name. “But the impact of such an event would be very unpredictable and risky for the leadership.”

Andrés then adds further insights.

There are other more recent instances of the government getting caught flatfooted in their response to demonstrations. The Belgrade Embassy bombing springs immediately to mind. While there was certainly a lot of anti-foreign/anti-American anger, I know for some people that was simply a vehicle to express their dislike of the CCP. It was a dangerous time for everyone really since if the demonstrations continued it’s likely that they would have begun focusing their energy on China at least as much as on NATO/America. However, if they were cut off too soon then the government could be accused of being unpatriotic and anger would definitely have moved on from foreigners to the CCP.

See also his earlier post on the likelihood of massive demonstrations after Zhao’s death and the CCP’s need to come to terms with the events at Tiananmen in 1989.

Earlier demonstrations in Tiananmen to honor another popular leader, Zhou Enlai (d. 1976), culminated in the Democracy Wall movement.

For some, the Cultural Revolution marked the beginning of an independent political consciousness and the means to express it, as seen, for example, in the controversial wall poster signed by Liyizhe, a pseudonym of its three authors, that appeared on November 7, 1974 in Guangzhou. It denounced the lawlessness, despotism, recklessness, and killings of the Cultural Revolution and called for democratic and individual rights. A larger-scale expression of increasing political independence occurred on April 5, 1976 with a demonstration in Tiananmen Square supposedly to honor Zhou Enlai, who had died in January 1976 without much official note. In actuality, the demonstration was an organized attack on the Cultural Revolution and the tyranny of the Gang of Four and implicitly of Mao. The April 5th demonstration was the first time since 1949 that ordinary Chinese had taken the initiative to launch their own movement and establish a public space where people could freely express their opinions. But it was suppressed after just a few days.Whereas purged party officials and skilled workers had planned the parades and the placards to be carried into the Square months before April 5, 1976, the Democracy Wall movement appears to have begun somewhat spontaneously. Against the background of the party’s official repudiation of the designation of the April 5th demonstration as a “counter-revolutionary” movement in the fall of 1978 and the official media’s calls for “socialist democracy and rule of law,” individuals and groups suddenly began to put up large-character posters and gathered together to discuss political issues at the Xidan wall on a busy street in the middle of Beijing in November 1978.

For more on one of the principal Democracy Wall activists, see this post on Wei Jingsheng.

Traveling in China, one easily picks up the rank smell of political decay. I left Beijing more convinced than ever that Communist Party rule would end, but without any better sense of how this might happen. The peaceful revolutions in Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe give no firm clues. Circumstances are not the same. I do not share the optimism of those who cling to the hope that the Chinese, in their infinite subtlety, will find a slow, gentle road to the Fifth Modernization [= Democracy], shepherded by the Communist Party. The KMT [Kuomintang = Nationalist Party] did it in Taiwan, but the Chinese Communist Party is not the KMT. Whatever it is that brings this rotting regime to an end, one can only hope it will be peaceful. But hope is not the same as expectation.

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), p. 337