Category Archives: China

The book I took along to read on my trip is so absorbing that I fear I shan’t be able to resist quoting numerous passages from it. In the introduction, Ian Buruma describes the role of walls erected to fortify China against the outside world. He describes first the role of the Great Wall in keeping barbarians at bay. Then he sketches a very different kind of wall, the “democracy wall” that sprang up during the thaw after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, upon which Wei Jingsheng posted under his own name the famous essay on the Fifth Modernization. Mao’s eventual successor Deng Xiaoping “had announced four modernizations: in agriculture, science, technology, and national defense. Wei added democracy, without which, he wrote, ‘the four others are nothing more than a newfangled lie.'”

There is also a third wall, fictional, the wall of a prison cell. It was described by a brilliant novelist, Han Shaogong. Like many Chinese intellectuals, Han was forced to “go down” to a remote rural area after the Cultural Revolution. He spent the 1970s tilling the fields in a small Hunanese village. Out of this experience came an extraordinary novel, Maqiao Dictionary, which is a kind of spoof anthropological dissection of village life through the language of its people. Each chapter is inspired by a slang expression. One of these is “democracy cell.”

The story is told by a local gambler, whom Han springs from jail by paying his fine. Dressed in rags, his hair matted with lice, the gambler stinks so badly that Han makes him take a bath before hearing his story. Refreshed, the man starts to whine. He had been really unlucky this time.

Unlucky?

Yes, this time he had experienced the worst: a democracy cell.

A democracy cell?

Well, says the man, it’s like this: In most prisons, every cell has a boss and a hierarchy of henchmen. The boss gets to eat the best food and the best spot to sleep, and when he wishes to peep at the female prisoners through a tiny window in the wall, his cellmates must prop him up, sometimes for hours, until they buckle under the strain. But, hard though it may be, at least there is order. Every man gets his food. You have time to wash your face and to piss. You might even get some rest. Such an arrangement is better than a democracy cell. Democracy is what you get when there is no cell boss. The men fight one another like savages. They all want to be boss. Unity breaks down. Gangs go to war: Cantonese against Sichuanese, northeasterners against Shanghainese. There is no chance of getting sleep. You can’t wash. You get lousy in no time, people are injured, and sometimes even killed.

This vignette of rural prison life is a perfect illustration of a common Chinese attitude toward democracy, or indeed political freedom. Many Chinese–and not just the rulers–associate democracy with violence and disorder. Only a big boss can make sure the common people get their food and rest. Only the equivalent of an emperor can keep the walled kingdom together. Without him, the Chinese empire will fall apart: region will fight region, and warlord will fight warlord. These assumptions rest on thousands of years of authoritarian rule, beginning with the first Qin emperor and his cursed Great Wall. And they are faithfully repeated by many in the West who presume to understand China….

“That Western-style stuff.” It is a recurring theme in China, and other autocracies outside the Western world, the assumption that only Europeans and Americans should have the benefit of democratic institutions. It is of course a theme running through European colonial history, too. But if China has a history of despots ruling over the great Chinese empire, it also has a history of schisms and disorder and disunity, of rebellions, and of brave, mad, and foolhardy men and women who defied the orthodoxy of their given rulers. Of course rebels are not necessarily democrats. But dismissing democracy as “Western-style stuff” would consign 1 billion Chinese to political subservience forever. That is why I approach the Chinese-speaking world in this book through the rebels, the dissidents, the awkward squad that resists authoritarianism. What is their idea of freedom? Or of China? What does dissidence mean in a Chinese society? What makes people try, against all odds, to defy their rulers? What chance do they have of succeeding? Will those virtual walls that make China the largest remaining dictatorship on earth every come down?

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), pp. xvii-xix

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SOURCE: The Christian Movement in the Japanese Empire, including Korea and Formosa, a Year Book for 1915 (Conference of Federated Missions, Japan, 1915), end pages

J. Curnow was replaced by the Inter-Mission mail-order service in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. In the diplomatic world, Peter Justesen plays a similar role today.

Korean Work in Tokyo and Honolulu – There are at present more than 500 Korean students studying in Tokyo. They are largely picked men whose influence will be disproportionately great when they return to their native homes. The Korean Young Men’s Christian Association has since September 7th, 1907, been working directly, and in co-operation with the Chinese and Japanese Young Men’s Christian Associations to bring these students to a vital faith in Jesus Christ. Besides the voluntary help given by the students themselves, three Korean Secretaries give their entire time to supervising this work….

Dr. Sigman Rhee [sic, emphasis added], the first Korean student secretary, has this year organized a Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Honolulu, and Mr. Choi Sang Ho, one of the secretaries of the work in Tokyo, has been sent there to aid in the completion of the organization.

SOURCE: “Korea, Part IV, Chapter II: Young Men’s Christian Association,” by Frank M. Brockman, in The Christian Movement in the Japanese Empire, including Korea and Formosa, a Year Book for 1915 (Conference of Federated Missions, Japan, 1915), pp. 438.

Location – Yong Jung is a station of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission. It is not in Korea, but across the border in the heart of the country known to the Koreans as North Kando, to the Japanese as Kanto[u] [Kwangtung, as in Kwangtung Army], and to the Chinese as Chientao [Jiandao]. The Japanese name for Yong Jung is Ryosai, and the Chinese Lung Chingtsun, or Lutaokou.

This station was opened in July 1913, for the purpose of getting in touch with, and carrying on work among the large numbers of Koreans who have of late years moved into Manchuria. Many of them are Christians, who have been connected with the Church in the thirteen provinces of Korea.

The territory connected with this station is all north of the Tuman River, which throughout its course is a boundery [sic] between China and Korea. It extends north from this river about 250 miles, and from east to west about 130 miles. It is bounded on the east and north-east by Russia. In this territory there are about 200,000 or 250,000 Koreans, and about an equal number of Chinese. There about eighty groups of Christians connected with the Canadian Presbyterian Mission, besides quite a number of Churches connected with the Church of Christ in Korea. In 1912, before the station was opened, twenty-eight Presbyterian groups were reported.

Organization of Work – Among the women there are three missionary societies which direct the work in certain Churches, and contribute the support of two Bible women who carry the Gospel to non-Christian villages.

The men have an evangelistic society covering the whole field. This society raises money for the support of a native pastor and an evangelist, the latter of whom is working among Churches and non-Christians in an eastern district near the Russian border. In addition to these, another evangelist is supported by contributions from the Bible women, colporteurs of the Bible Society, and other workers in the field.

SOURCE: “Korea, Part V, Chapter III: North Kando, Canadian Presbyterian Mission,” by W. R. Foote, in The Christian Movement in the Japanese Empire, including Korea and Formosa, a Year Book for 1915 (Conference of Federated Missions, Japan, 1915), pp. 444-445.

Japan and the War – From the time Japan entered the World-war last summer, down to to-day, she appears to have acted scrupulously and considerately in all her dealings with friend and foe alike.

Sympathy with Germany – The true attitude of Japan to the war has been little known and perhaps less understood, and we must wait for the close of the war before all that can be said to her credit shall be made public. There were many considerations which would naturally have strongly influenced Japan to maintain either a neutral position in the war, or to become an ally of Germany. Japan’s large trade with Germany, the fact that many of her doctors and other professional men have been educated in Germany and hence are strongly German in their sympathies, and the very important fact that Japan’s military organization is copied after Germany and many of the military leaders have been trained in Germany–all combined to produce a very strong sympathy with that nation.

Japan’s Share in War – It was no easy task which Count Okuma faced in leading the nation unitedly to support its ally, England, and to engage early in the attack upon Kiaochau and the successful conquest of that port. It is not difficult to imagine how different would have been the condition of the great port cities of the Far East, Hongkong, Shanghai, Tientsin, and others, had Japan pursued a different policy and failed to render useless for German military purposes the port of Kiaochau, with its splendid base for the German navy. Her effective patrol of the Pacific guaranteed safety and security to ports and shipping of all nations, which the British navy was entirely unable to provide. The career of the Emden furnishes a suggestion of what might have occurred very generally throughout the Eastern waters, had Japan been less efficient in protecting the world’s shipping.

Kiaochou and Belgium – Her treatment of Kiaochou stands out in strong contrast with Germany’s treatment of Belgium, and her treatment of the German prisoners interned in Japan is greatly to her credit, when we bear in mind the indignities reported as borne by Japanese at the same time in Germany, and its natural effect upon the public mind.

Troops to Europe – The Government did not approve of the project favoured in some parts of Europe, and desired by some in Japan, of sending troops to the European war. It was ready however and willing to send Red Cross nurses and to give such other practical assistance as it could.

Support of Russia – Perhaps in no way could Japan have offered a more practical support to her ally, or have given stronger evidence of her actual sympathy, than in her voluntary assurance to her recent enemy, Russia, that she was free to withdraw all her troops from Eastern Siberia, if needed for the war, without any fear of advantage being taken of it by Japan.

Japan in South Seas – The energy which Japan showed in wresting from the Germans their Island possessions in the South Pacific is further evidence of the valuable support which she is giving to her allies. Japan well knows that in doing all this she is making of Germany an implacable enemy, and is sacrificing a relationship of great possibility, both commercially and politically.

Had the designs of Japan upon China been as selfish and inconsiderate as many are inclined to suppose, it is difficult to understand why she did not, at the outset of the war, throw her lot with Germany, whose chances of success, at least at that time, gave promise of being far greater than they appeared later on, and whose support would have been most valuable if Japan had designs regarding Chinese territory and wished to appropriate a part of that country to herself.

Relations with America – As a result of the restless activity of Jingoists on both sides of the Pacific, it is not too much to say that at times during the past year conditions have been exceedingly sensitive and gave rise to no little anxiety as to what might follow. The attitude of the two governments toward each other has at no time been such as to occasion deep concern, but the continuous and unabating sensational reports and cablegrams which have been sent back and forth have occasioned much unrest, and there has been at times fear what thoughtless persons might be led to do under the circumstances. One must carefully consider what might follow if some reckless and hotheaded youth should lead in an assault upon the American Embassy in Tokyo, plunging his country into serious international difficulties….

Relations with China – The developments of the past year have revealed an attitude of China towards Japan, and of Japan towards China, which is the ground of great discussion and difference of opinion. It is plain to see that there is apparently a fear of Japan on the part of China, and a misunderstanding of Japan on the part of foreigners dwelling in China, which must cause Japan in any case great uneasiness.

Distrust of Japan – It is difficult to understand why China should prefer to have her territory under German influence rather than under Japanese influence, but so it would seem. Why Englishmen in China should distrust a country which has already done them such good service, as Japan has done to the foreigners in China since the war began, it is hard to explain; but if the foreign press is to be believed, and if reports which come to Japan are to be given any credit, there is certainly at present a most antagonistic feeling toward Japan on the part of very many.

SOURCE: “General Survey,” by John Lincoln Dearing, in The Christian Movement in the Japanese Empire, including Korea and Formosa, a Year Book for 1915 (Conference of Federated Missions, Japan, 1915), pp. 7-11.

In the introduction to a new reader in traditional Chinese culture, Victor H. Mair suggests that the culture embodied in the unique Chinese writing system has served as the “glue” that maintained continuity in the face of constant buffeting from every direction.

China’s society was not static and its culture was far from unvariegated. Coupled with the cyclical collapse of dynasties, this sociocultural volatility might well have led to the utter disintegration of Chinese civilization. What, then, held it together? What was the quintessential glue that prevented the dissolution of “this culture [of ours]”? We have no hesitation whatsoever in declaring that it was none other than dedication to the hallowed culture itself, bearing in mind that wen [Ko. mun, Jp. bun] means both “culture” and “writing.” That is to say, it was the traditional culture (wenhua) [Ko. munhwa, Jp. bunka] and all its attendant values, as embodied in the sacred script (wenzi) [Ko. munja, Jp. mo(n)ji] that bound Chinese civilization in a cohesive and enduring whole. By dint of diligence and through the good fortune of privilege, approximately 2 percent of the populace in premodern China attained full literacy and all the perquisites that pertained to it, which were not inconsiderable.

Given that full literacy normally brought with it both prestige and pecuniary benefit, it is small wonder that many men devoted their lives to the acquisition and exercise of the ability to write well. (With a few very rare exceptions, women were excluded from the enterprise of fine writing.) Those accustomed to universal literacy using an alphabetic script and a living, vernacular language, may find it hard to imagine the exceptional effort required to gain an advanced degree of competency in a highly allusive, dead (i.e., not used for speech) language written with an elaborate logographic script. For those who did put forward the required exertion, their command of the script, plus the satisfaction of knowing that they were contributing to the preservation of Chinese culture, made it all worthwhile.

In a footnote, Mair notes that “strictly speaking, the Chinese characters are not logographs, because not every character is equal to a word. Much less are the characters ideographs, a term that is often irresponsibly applied to them. Technically speaking, the Chinese script may be designated as morphosyllabic or semantosyllabic. The grounds for such a designation are outlined in John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language” (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984).

With the twentieth century, however, the combination of culture and script began to unravel. With the overthrow of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in 1911 by revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the institutional support for the examination system that upheld “this culture [of ours]” evaporated. By 1919, progressive intellectuals were promoting writing in the vernacular, and radical activists were proposing the adoption of an alphabetic script. A direct assault on the script itself came with the promulgation of thousands of simplified characters by the Communist government during the 1950s and 1950s. An outrageous affront to those who cherish the script and all that it embraces, the simplified characters were seen by reformers as essential for expanding literacy to workers and farmers and necessary for the sake of efficiency in diverse types of communication.

By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new threat to the traditional script was emerging: the computer. IT (information technology) specialists are acutely aware of the tremendous stumbling blocks in the way of free and easy access to electronic data processing by users of Chinese characters. The input, storage, and management of a script consisting of tens of thousands of discrete elements poses mind-boggling problems in comparison with the couple hundred letters and typographic characters of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). The economic costs in terms of vastly larger memories, slower manipulations, more frequent crashes and bugs due to overly intricate programming, and so forth are staggering.

One of the most poignant ironies of the saga of characters in computers is that the alphabet has come to their (partial) rescue. Of the hundreds and hundreds of schemes that have been devised for inputting Chinese characters in computers, by far the most popular are those relying on the alphabet. And, of the alphabetic schemes, those that rely on whole words rather than single syllables are much more user-friendly and computer-friendly. For example, both computers and human beings find it easier to analyze the following eight syllables of a journal title as Zhongguo lishi dili luncong (Collected Papers on Chinese Historical Geography) than as zhong guo li shi di li lun cong (central kingdom successive scribe/history ground principle discussion cluster). Herein lurks a danger. Once computers and human beings get used to parsing strings of syllables into words rather than resolutely keeping them separate, alphabetic inputting is on its way to becoming an independent script.

The defenders of the characters, who also view themselves as defenders of the last bastion of Chinese culture, have not been slow to recognize this threat, and they have been adamantly opposed to any hint of a move toward legitimation of the formal establishment of what is called fenci lianxie (‘word division’). Throughout history, Chinese scholars have always resisted the insertion of spaces between words. In fact, until the twentieth century, there was no concept of ci (‘word’), only that of zi (‘[syllabic] graph/character’). Despite the vociferous opposition of the defenders of characters, the Chinese government has officially established a set of Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography and private software companies and individuals are producing their own refinements apace.

Willy-nilly, pinyin orthography is becoming a reality.

Does that mean the cultural glue is cracking apart?

The following excerpt from the introduction by Victor H. Mair to a new reader in traditional Chinese culture now in the works emphasizes the multiethnic nature of traditional China.

Linguistic multifariousness is only one of the more obvious features of “the Chinese mosaic.” The same may be said of almost any other aspect of Chinese culture and society. Perhaps the most obvious symbol of Chineseness in the larger world is cuisine. Yet it is impossible to point to any particular type of fare that stands for Chinese cooking in general. Hot pots have a Mongolic ancestry, pasta products are derived from Central and Southwest Asia, tea is ultimately from the hills of the Assam-Burma-Yunnan “Golden Triangle,” and so forth. Milk products are anathema to most lactose-intolerant denizens of the Central Kingdom, yet they are a staple of the people living along its northern reaches. The more sophisticated American aficionado of Chinese cooking knows very well the difference between Szechwanese and Cantonese cooking, staying clear of the former if he or she does not like spicy hot food and avoiding the latter if his or her palate is not attracted to gelatinous, gooey comestibles.

When we watch a Chinese film and see the heroine encased in a tight sheath slit to the thigh, she is basically sporting an item of Manchu dress. Some Chinese (those who wanted to ride horses) began to wear trousers in the latter part of the fourth century B.C.E., but only because they wanted to ward off the steppe peoples who introduced the domesticated horse (and the trousers) to their land, with devastating consequences. In premodern times, it would not have been difficult to recognize the ethnicity of a citizen of the Chinese empire by his or his costume.

As for Chinese empires, there was not one of them, but a long series of dynasties, more often than not erected on the ashes of their predecessors. Also more often than not, those who established new dynasties were–a supreme incongruity–groups from the north and northwest who either were themselves “barbarians” dreaded for their awesome military prowess or who had exceptionally close affinities with them. Numerous recent archeological discoveries have led to a salutary reconsideration of the nature of the millennial interactions between the inhabitants of the East Asian Heartland (EAH) and their septentrional neighbors. As a result, it is no longer possible to think of the latter only as “traders or raiders.” Instead, what we are finding is that–already at least from the late Neolithic period and continuing right through to the twentieth century–the northern peoples were involved not only in state formation, but also in the importation of vital cultural elements such as bronze metallurgy and the chariot. Consequently, in this Reader we place far greater emphasis than is usual upon the northern peoples, for we believe that, unless one takes them duly into account, one’s comprehension of Chinese history and appreciation of Chinese culture are bound to be flawed.

The intricacy of Chinese involvement with wide-ranging steppe peoples can be demonstrated by the derivation of Gesar … from Caesar. How, why, and when this originally Etruscan title of the Roman emperors came to be applied by the bards of a Central Asia nomadic confederation to their greatest hero is an intriguing story. What is not in doubt is that the Tibetans contested with the Chinese for hegemony during the Tang period (618-907). Indeed, the Tibetans not only occupied the strategically crucial Gansu Corridor for a century, but even invested the capital, Chang’an [= Xian, see map], for a while during the year 763 in western China and were dislodged only when the Tang authorities pleaded with the Uyghurs … to drive them off. Thus, a dynasty that was initially founded by individuals in whose veins ran nomadic blood and who maintained intimate ties with their northern ancestors found temporary salvation from destruction at the hands of northwestern nomads by a confederation of Turkic tribes (whom the Tang actually detested)–a typical series of events that recurred over and over again during the more than three thousand years of known Chinese history. We should remember, moreover, that the Tang dynasty represents the acme of cultural cosmopolitanism in East Asia. It should further be noted that the location of the Tibetans was by no means restricted solely to that of their current nation, which is occupied by Chinese troops. During the medieval period, they were also identified with the border areas to the northwest of the East Asian Heartland, and still today there are large concentrations of Tibetans in the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai.

Just as due consideration of the non-Sinitic peoples of the north and northwest is essential for any adequate study of the development of Chinese civilization, the same may be said for the non-Sinitic inhabitants of the south. Chinese culture (including Sinitic languages) marched southward slowly during the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E., gained momentum during the first millennium C.E., and was far from reaching its culmination even by the end of the twentieth century. The large and small pockets of non-Sinitic speakers that pepper all of the provinces south of the Yangtze River attest to the ongoing presence of peoples from radically different traditions within the territory of the modern Chinese state. The fusion of Chinese culture with the indigenous populations has led to a distinctive mix of regional cultures and ethniticities that is conspicuous in customs, languages, surnames, and physical types.