china review international
Volume 19 • Number 1 • 2012
Editor Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai‘i
Managing Editor Nicholas S. Hudson, University of Hawai‘i
Corresponding Editors ( Europe) Carine Defoort, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; (China)
An Pingqiu, Peking University; Liu Dong, Tsinghua University
Board of Advisors University of Hawai‘i Center for Chinese Studies Executive Committee
Board of Editors
Peter K. Bol, Harvard University
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Susan Bush, J. K. Fairbank Center, Harvard
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China Review International
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China Review
International
Volume 19
Number 1
2012
A Journal of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in Chinese Studies
features
“Visiting Humanists” and Their Interpreters: Ricci (and Ruggieri) in China
(reviewing Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci
1552–1610) Reviewed by Elisabetta Corsi 1
Who Was Homer Lea (1876–1912) and Why Should We Care? Myth and History in
the “American Century” (reviewing Lawrence M. Kaplan, Homer Lea: American
Soldier of Fortune) Reviewed by Roger R. Thompson 9
Whose Hong Kong? Views and Movements Local and Global (reviewing Stanley S. K.
Kwan with Nicole Kwan, The Dragon and the Crown: Hong Kong Memoirs; Janet
W. Salaff, Siu-lun Wong, and Arent Greve, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers:
Narratives of Family Migration; Leo Ou-fan Lee, City between Worlds: My Hong
Kong) Reviewed by Ming K. Chan 23
History, Identity, and the State in East Asia (reviewing Gotelind Müller, Designing
History in East Asian Textbooks: Identity Politics and Transnational Aspirations;
James Reilly, Strong Society, Smart State: The Rise of Public Opinion in China’s
Japan Policy) Reviewed by Elizabeth A. Cole 34
reviews
Alexander Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China:
Patterns of Literary Circulation Reviewed by Nicholas Morrow Williams 45
Nanlai Cao, Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in
Contemporary Wenzhou Reviewed by Paul P. Mariani 53
Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project, Settlement
Patterns in the Chifeng Region Reviewed by Sarah Milledge Nelson 57
Published by the
University of
Hawai‘i Center
for Chinese Studies
and University
of Hawai‘i Press
John Dardess, Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire Reviewed by Khee Heong Koh 61
Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing Reviewed by Jun Fang 64
Paul R. Goldin, Confucianism Reviewed by Joseph A. Adler 67
Jonathan Goldstein, Stephen Girard’s Trade with China, 1787–1824: The Norms
versus the Profits of Trade Reviewed by Dong Wang 71
ii China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Xiaolin Guo, State and Ethnicity in China’s Southwest Reviewed by Tami
Blumenfield 73
Yufan Hao and Bill K. P. Chou, editors, China’s Policies on Its Borderlands and the
International Implications Reviewed by David Kerr 78
Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, editors, Mao’s Invisible Hand: The
Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China Reviewed by Xiaojia
Hou 84
You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in
China Reviewed by Terry G. McGee 87
Katrien Jacobs, People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese
Internet; Mary Manjikian, Threat Talk: The Comparative Politics of Internet
Addiction Reviewed by Alex Golub 92
Roger B. Jeans, editor, The Marshall Mission to China, 1945–1947: The Letters and
Diary of Colonel John Hart Caughey Reviewed by Dong Wang 97
Linda Cooke Johnson, Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in
Liao and Jin China Reviewed by Jennifer W. Jay 100
Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking Reviewed
by Paul Spickard 103
Weijing Lu, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China Reviewed by Jennifer W. Jay 105
Paul G. Pickowicz, China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and
Controversy Reviewed by Jing Jing Chang 109
Morten Shlütter and Stephen F. Teiser, editors, Readings of the Platform Sūtra;
Philip Yampolsky, The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of the
Tun-huang Manuscript Reviewed by Chanju Mun 111
Shen Fu, Six Records of a Life Adrift (translation, introduction, and notes by
Graham Sanders) Reviewed by Joe Sample 116
Scott Snyder, China’s Rise and the Two Koreas: Politics, Economics, Security Reviewed by Kirk W. Larsen 119
Kenneth M. Swope, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First
Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 Reviewed by Andrew R. Wilson 122
Zhijian Tao, Drawing the Dragon: Western European Reinvention of China Reviewed by Joe Sample 126
Tsai Suey-Ling 蔡穗玲, The Life of the Buddha: Woodblock Illustrated Books in
China and Korea Reviewed by Ann Heirman 131
Wang Jun, Beijing Record: A Physical History of Planning Modern Beijing Reviewed by Toby Lincoln 136
Table of Contents iii
John Whalley, editor, China’s Integration into the World Economy; Zheng Yongnian
and Sarah Y. Tong, editors, China and the Global Economic Crisis Reviewed by
Haider A. Khan 140
Brantly Womack, China Among Unequals: Asymmetric Foreign Relations in
Asia Reviewed by Sheng Ding 146
Zaijun Yuan, The Failure of China’s “Democratic” Reforms Reviewed by JeanPhillipe Béja 149
works received 152
Features
“Visiting Humanists” and Their Interpreters: Ricci (and
Ruggieri) in China
Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia. A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xiv, 359 pp. Hardcover £40.00, isbn
978-0-19-959225-8. Paperback £19.99, isbn 978-0-19-965653-0.
All books speak about their authors, even if authors are not aware of it; even when,
as it is the case with biographies, they intend to distance themselves from their
object. This book does so in a special way.
Born in Hong Kong and trained in early modern European history, Ronnie
Po-chia Hsia is today known as one of the leading experts in Counter-Reformation
history, a field that was traditionally dominated by very conservative historiography. In his many contributions, Hsia availed himself of remarkable linguistic skills
in major modern languages and an equal mastery of classical languages ranging
from Latin to old German and Dutch. In so doing, he was able to access and make
available to scholars an extremely broad range of hitherto unpublished sources.
Enriched by a unique background, Hsia has gradually begun to explore new
territories in the field of sinology and Chinese studies. Writing about Matteo Ricci,
an Italian Jesuit of the late Renaissance who spent most of his adult life in China,
mastered the language, and interacted significantly with both the local and the
court elite, may have induced Hsia to think back, on occasion, to his own intellectual accomplishments.
According to Paul Ricoeur in Soi-même comme un autre, the self (ipse) is not
construed by a duplication of itself (idem) but by its relationship with the other.
François Dosse has interpreted Ricoeur’s words as being particularly true in the
case of biographical writing because
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
biographical writing is closer to this movement toward the other and the alteration of the self that is thereby transformed into the other. Such an endeavor
entails some danger because the biographer must strive to maintain the right
distance between the loss of his identity and the failure to render the singularity
of the subject of the biography. This is not easy at all because the ship may frequently sink under the strength of the waves of passion or the need to maintain
an objective distance, both as necessary as it is the permanent preoccupation not
to go astray.1
2 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Although, on occasion, Hsia shows excessive appreciation for Ricci’s talents, he
manages to counterbalance his esteem toward the Italian missionary by pointing
out the external ingredients of his success, including Ricci’s cleverness in self-­
promotion, also at the expenses of his elder companion, Michele Ruggieri. We
shall return to this point later.
Being an exercise in the art of biography, the book obviously focuses on its
main character, Matteo Ricci, but tells the main episodes in the story of his life in
connection with the places where they occurred and that may have exercised an
influence on them. Thus, the book opens up with Macerata and Rome, where Ricci
was born and spent his youth. Macerata in 1552, the year of Ricci’s birth, was an
important city, situated in the Marche, a region so called because it stood at the
margins of the Papal States.
Ricci had been sent to Rome by his father, a wealthy pharmacist, who had
great plans for his son. He had Matteo enrolled at La Sapienza to study jurisprudence. Indeed, the study of law was not one of the faculties for which the university at Rome was renowned; it was “a significant second-line law school that
produced a large number of graduates.”2 Although Hsia is right in pointing out
that “we know next to nothing about Matteo at the university” ( p. 5), we can still
make a few conjectures that may help us get a better understanding of his intellectual background. In this review, attention will be paid to the chapters in which
Hsia discusses Ricci’s education in Rome and Lisbon, connecting it with the
missionary’s textual production in China, thereby providing a few integrations that
hopefully will enrich our understanding of Ricci as a “visiting humanist.”3
Indeed, the years spent at the University of Rome may have played a more
significant role than it has been thought of so far in orienting Ricci’s future attitude toward Chinese culture as it is reflected in his writings. In 1567, the year prior
to Ricci’s enrollment, La Sapienza was the first university in Italy to establish a
Pandects professorship, a post that implied the explanation of the Corpus juris
civilis or Digest (the main body of legal texts dealing with Roman law that, together
with the Corpus juris canonici, constituted the basis of legal instruction), according
to the humanistic tenets of historicity and philological accuracy. From 1567 to 1572,
the position was held by the French humanist Marc-Antoine Muret, who later
moved to rhetoric.4 It is highly possible that Ricci attended at least three of
Muret’s annual prolusions during which the eminent jurist extolled the virtues of
eloquence and humanistic criticism of traditional jurisprudence. Muret’s lectures
may have represented Ricci’s first encounter with studia humanitatis and may have
played a role in shaping his decision to follow a path different from the one his
father had foreseen for him. In spite of Muret’s lectures, the study of law did not
have a great appeal to Matteo who, in 1571, asked to be admitted to the Jesuit
novitiate at Sant’Andrea at Monte Cavallo (now the Quirinale). Notwithstanding
his father’s wishes, Ricci was determined to change the course of his life. At the
novitiate, he had his first encounter with Alessandro Valignano who, years later,
Features 3
would play a key role in devising a strategy for the Jesuits’ missionary presence in
Asia and would be instrumental in Ricci’s final assignment to the China mission.
Having completed the period of novitiate, he was accepted as a scholastic at the
Roman College in September 1572. Hsia makes a general reconstruction of Ricci’s
curriculum there and identifies a few of his professors,5 emphasizing the relevance
of classical knowledge in line with the studia humanitatis — a tradition that was
already consolidated in major Italian universities of the late Renaissance.6 Mastery
of that tradition also contributed to shape Ricci’s and other Jesuits’ treatment of
nonclassical philosophical traditions, mainly the Chinese one.7 Indeed, Hsia suggests
that the Catholic notion of orthodoxy implied a conception of Christianitas,
which, while hinting at the historical continuity from classical antiquity to the
Christian present, at the same time meant the triumph of the present over the past
( p. 19). To this end, eloquence acquired through the mastery of Cicero was made
to serve a higher goal whenever it was used to demonstrate the truth of Revelation,
as much as Aristotelian cosmology could be blended with the story of the creation
narrated in the Biblical book of Genesis. Ricci would later give proof of his rhetorical flair in a slender book, the Jiren shipian 畸人十篇 (Ten discourses of the man
of paradox), to which Hsia devotes much of the twelfth chapter. Conceived as a
short pamphlet in the arte della conversazione,8 an early Renaissance new gentlemanly practice, it reported ten conversations, revised and embellished for editorial
purposes, held by Ricci on the occasion of the triennial scrutiny in 1607 — an event
that had brought to Beijing thousands of scholars ( p. 269). Taking advantage of
such a large-scale gathering, Ricci hosted many acquaintances he had made while
staying at Nanchang and Nanjing, escorting them to visit his church and library,
therefore providing them with some relief from the fatigue of their bureaucratic
duties.
Rome was the city that most of all epitomized the tension between Christianitas
and classical antiquity. Hsia’s remarkable description of Rome as “the monument
of Christian triumph over pagan antiquity” ( p. 19) reminds one of Piero della
Francesca’s Resurrection, with the glorified Christ emerging from a classical whitemarbled sarcophagus.
Of all the courses attended by Ricci at the Roman College, the ones that he
took from Christopher Clavius seem to have had the strongest impact on him.
Clavius had been instrumental in implementing the calendrical reform during the
reign of Pope Gregory XIII,9 in addition to being the mastermind of an Academy
of Mathematics at the Roman College to which Ricci was admitted in 1575. The
academy did not outlive its founder, but the teaching of pure and mixed mathe­
matics (mathesis pura et mixta) continued to be imparted in many Jesuit colleges,
particularly the ones, such as the College of S. Antão in Lisbon, that were more
directly concerned with training missionaries bound for East Asia.10 The quality of
mathematical knowledge acquired by Ricci during the years spent with Clavius is
testified by the number of works in Chinese that he produced in this field and that
4 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
are dealt with by Hsia in chapters 9, 10, and 11. Since the period spent under
Clavius’s tutorship is relatively short, it may be also possible that Ricci attended
one of the abbaco schools during his youth. Typical of the Italian Renaissance,
these were schools specialized in providing basic notions of practical arithmetic
and were especially patronized by merchant families to ensure that their offspring
acquired the competence needed to pursue the family business.11
Some of the arithmetical texts composed by Ricci indeed show a high degree
of skill in problem-solving, while others seem to be based on the “sequence of
readings in mathematics” (orden de la lectura en mathematicas), which was the
way the mathematical course was taught in Jesuit colleges. According to this
schedule, the course began with the first three books of Euclid’s Elements, followed
by notions of practical mathematics, then the sphere and geography, then back to
Euclid’s books 5 and 6, the Astrolabes, the theory of planets, optics, horology, and
ecclesiastic computation.12
The mathematical and astronomical books produced by Ricci, as well as any
other text compiled by missionaries in China, regardless of the subject, were far
from being lonesome enterprises, since they resulted from a complex process
where various agencies came into play. Essential steps in this process were the
transmission, mainly oral, of the main content of the text by the missionary to the
Chinese convert, who was far from being a simple scribe. The Chinese collaborator
might have been directly involved in the choice of the most appropriate terminology, as the texts show frequent borrowings from an earlier Chinese textual tradition, even if sometimes the convert was compelled to create neologisms or make
use of semantic loans in order to achieve the best rendition of the original. Manuscripts eventually went through a series of revisions, edited both by missionaries
and Chinese converts. This scrutiny was aimed at improving the style and, at the
same time, expurgating the texts of whatever might contradict Church doctrine.
By this token, the Chinese books composed by Ricci and his confreres are not
true and proper translations of an identifiable source, but may be considered
adaptations of a plurality of sources, among which are books missionaries had at
their disposal while writing — certainly not very many in Ricci’s time — as well as
their own classroom notes, including various abridgments known as summula and
collectanea, and commonplace books.13
Ricci’s remarks about his selective use of different sources, delivered in a letter
to the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Acquaviva, are enlightening
in this regard. Also they lay bare the missionary’s criticism of an often too rigid
censorship:
Under all circumstances, books licensed by the Provincial, would have to be
revised and approved only by those who know the Sinic script and language;
secondarily because the books that we make here are not new items, for we take
out of our [source] books all we need for our purposes in China and solum
interponimus iudicium in seligendo [and we exert our judgment only in the
selection of the sources].14
Features 5
The majority of scientific texts were composed by Ricci in collaboration with the
famous converts and intellectuals Xu Guangqi 徐光啟 and Li Zhizao 李之藻. The
most notable ones being:
• Jihe yuanben 幾何原本 (The origin of geometry, 1607). It is the translation,
made by Ricci in collaboration with Xu Guangqi, of the first six books of
Euclid’s Elements, edited and annotated by Clavius: Euclidis Elementorum libri
XV (Rome, 1574).
• Hungai tongxian tushuo 渾蓋通憲圖書 (Illustrated description of the sphere
and the astrolabe, 1607). It is an adaptation, made by Ricci and Li Zhizao, of
Clavius’s treatise on The Astrolabium (Rome, 1593).
• Qiankun tiyi 乾坤體義 (The meaning of the terrestrial body, 1608), composed
by Ricci and Li Zhizao, on the basis of Clavius’s annotated version of the
famous astronomical textbook by Sacrobosco, Tractatus de Sphaera (Rome,
1570). It includes a set of figures with annotations, translated as Yuanrong
jiaoyi 圜容較義 (The meaning of compared [figures] inscribed in a circle).
Ruan Yuan 阮元 in Chouren zhuan 籌人傳 gives a long explanation of this
treatise, which was also included in the Siku Quanshu 四庫全書.
• Tongwen suanzhi 同文算指 (Instructions for calculation in a common script,
1614). This is a collection of earlier texts compiled by Ricci with Li Zhizao,
mainly based on Clavius’s Epitome Arithmeticae Practicae (Rome, 1583).15
Ricci began to work on a Chinese rendition of Renaissance astronomy during his
residence in the south capital, Nanjing (chapter 8). Fashioning himself as “another
Ptolemy,” Ricci dismissed Chinese astronomy, not realizing, as Hsia points out,
that Chinese astronomers had recorded observations of supernovae and comets
many centuries before their European counterparts ( p. 185).
From the excursus of Ricci’s literary endeavors, provided by Hsia in chapters 7
through 12, we can see that most of his scientific production dates back to the
periods spent in Nanjing and Beijing, thereby reflecting the kind of expertise that
was mostly a response to Chinese interests. If, while residing in Nanchang, Ricci
mainly devoted himself to writing theological and philosophical tracts — such as
Tianzhu shiyi 天主實義 (De Deo vera ratio, a first version composed in Nanchang,
it was later published in Beijing), Jiaoyou lun 交友論 (De Amicitia, Nanchang,
1595; second edition Beijing, 1603), and Xiguo jifa 西國記法 (Mnemotecnica,
Nanchang, 1595) — it is during the ascent to Beijing that he must have realized that
the Christian message could be better conveyed through astronomy and mathe­
matics, since these two disciplines could, better than any other, captivate the
attention of the Chinese literati. Ricci gave proof of his skill in cartography, a field
that implied the practical application of astronomical and mathematical knowledge. His map of the world, Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖, first drawn in Zhaoqing in
1584 and later revised in Nanjing in 1598, was reproduced several times. Its fame
even reached the Wanli emperor, who ordered that a copy be made for his perusal.
Almost a century later, Ricci’s confrere, Giambattista Riccioli, consecrated it to the
honor of the press, having it engraved in his famous compendium of astronomy
and mathematics, Almagestum novum (fol. 11, Bologna, 1651).
6 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Ricci is mostly known for an apologetic tract on the Catholic religion, entitled
Tianzhu shiyi, in which, while refuting the Chinese notions of deity, he exposes
the Biblical doctrine of creation and the immortality of human soul. Hsia, who
engages in a detailed discussion of this text in chapter 10, is right in referring to it
as a treatise on philosophy and theology ( p. 184), and not as a catechism, as it has
been thus far wrongly defined.
It is worth noting that the arrival of Ricci in Goa in 1578 is marked by the
printing of the first edition of a Doctrina Christiana by the Jesuit press in Goa. The
full title of the text reads: DOCTRINA CHRISTIAM en Lingua Malauar Tamul/
Doctrina Cristaã treSladada em lingua Tamul pello padre Anrique Anriquez da
Copanhia de IESU & pello padre Manoel de São Pedro. Another edition of this
religious compendium, printed at the Jesuit College in Cochin, followed in 1579:
Doctrina Christã, a maneira de Dialogo: feyta em portugal pello padre Marco Iorge
da Companhia de IESV: Tresladada em lingual Malauar Tamul, pello padre Anrique
Anriquez da mesma Cõpanhia. Impressa . . . Em Cochim, no Collegio da Madre
de Deus.16 This tract may have been a possible source also of Ruggieri’s earlier
religious compendium, the Tianzhu shilu 天主實錄, since they both have the same
dialogical structure and apologetic tone. Hsia points out the paradoxical character
of this text: it refutes Buddhism while, at the same time, it often employs a terminology pertaining to Buddhist discourse ( p. 94). In spite of the fact that Michele
Ruggieri was, in fact, the founder of the Jesuit mission in China and the first
author of a Christian work published in Chinese, he is barely remembered as the
old companion who paved the way for Ricci’s more glorious enterprise. Thanks to
Hsia’s careful reconstruction, Ruggieri’s character emerges as that of a gentle and
sensible mediator between the ruthless and greedy Portuguese traders and the
mandarins. His charismatic persona, combined with his knowledge of the language and rules of etiquette, did more to captivate the local Chinese authorities
than did the exotic gifts presented by the Portuguese ( p. 68).
Ruggieri should also be remembered as the author of the first translation into
Latin of an excerpt from a Chinese classic ever published in Europe: the preface to
the Da Xue, rendered as humanae institutionis ratio. Antonio Possevino, a wellknown professor at the Roman College, later included it in his Bibliotheca Selecta
(Book 9, c. 25, Padua, 1593). Possevino duly acknowledged his debt to Ruggieri,
who had been sent back to Rome by Valignano to seek papal support in favor of
the Ming dynasty, unaware of the fact that he would never return to China. During
his stay in Rome, Ruggieri had long meetings with Possevino, who acquired from
him sufficient material to devote two chapters of his work (chapters 25 and 26) to
Chinese philosophy and history. Given the early date and broad circulation of the
Bibliotheca selecta, Ruggieri’s contribution should not pass unnoticed, for it made
available to an extensive readership in Europe one of the texts that most of all
epitomized the essence of Confucianism.
Features 7
On April 20, 2012, a celebration in support of the canonization of Matteo Ricci
took place at the Diocese of Macerata. It was a culminating event of a two-year
program during which a large number of books devoted to Ricci appeared. It is
difficult to ascertain to what extent such publications contributed to gather evidence of Ricci’s sanctity and if A Jesuit in the Forbidden City was ever considered
by the committee for this purpose.
Indeed, in Hsia’s view, “the patron of the Jesuit Mission was not quite a saint:
wily in the ways of power, Ricci acted more like a minister” ( p. 268), receiving the
visits of a carefully established network of influent acquaintances, without ever
setting foot outside the imperial capital. In the course of this review, I have highlighted several of the book’s merits, among which is that of having done justice to
Michele Ruggieri, the true pioneer of the Jesuitical mission in China. It was the
growing tension between the two missionaries in Zhaoqing that caused Ruggieri’s
dismissal, and not, as Valignano reported to the General Acquaviva in 1588, his
mediocrely spoken Chinese. Feeling the challenge posed by Ruggieri’s profound
knowledge of the Chinese classics and, consequently, his appeal to the literati,
Ricci — quite unexpectedly for a candidate to the honor of the altars — may have
yielded to human weakness. Insinuating in Valignano’s mind the idea that Ruggieri
was unfit for the mission on account of his health and age and linguistic limitations, Ricci secured himself the leadership of the China mission. “Among the
thunderous applause for Ricci” — Hsia writes at the beginning of the fifth chapter — “it is time to remember the achievements of the older man” ( p. 97). For the
Roman Catholic establishment, unfortunately, this time has not yet arrived.
Elisabetta Corsi
Elisabetta Corsi is a professor of classical Chinese and sinology at La Sapienza, State
University of Rome. Her current research focuses on the contribution of Jesuit
missionaries to the transmission of Renaissance Aristotelianism to China, especially
in the field of natural philosophy.
Notes
1. “La escritura biográfica cercana a ese movimiento hacia el otro y a la alteración del yo
hacia la construcción de un sí-mismo que se ha convertido en otro. Evidentemente, una aventura
así no deja de ser riesgosa: entre la pérdida de su identidad y el hecho de carecer de la singularidad del sujeto de la biografía, el biógrafo debe saber mantener la distancia justa, lo que no es
nada sencillo, puesto que el barco puede irse a pique muchas veces y los arrebatos pasionales o las
tomas de distancia que objetivan son tan necesarias para su investigación como la preocupación
permanente por no perder el rumbo.” Francois Dosse, El arte de la biografía (L’art de la biographie: Entre histoire et fiction) (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2007), p. 19.
2. P. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002), p. 460. References provided in the footnotes are not included in the
bibliography of the book being reviewed.
3. I borrow this expression from H. L. Goodman and A. Grafton, “Ricci, the Chinese, and
the Toolkits of Textualists,” Asia Major 3, no. 2 (1990–1991): 96.
8 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
4. P. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002), p. 459. On the humanists’ criticism of traditional jurisprudence, see
pp. 430–473.
5. So far the most thorough reconstruction of Ricci’s curriculum at the Roman College is
provided by F. Bortone, P. Matteo Ricci S.I., il “Saggio d’Occidente.” Un grande italiano nella Cina
impenetrabile (1552–1610) (Rome: Desclée & C.-Editori Pontifici, 1965).
6. On this topic, see P. Grendler, The Universities, especially pp. 199–248.
7. On this problem, see Goodrich and Grafton, “Ricci, the Chinese,” p. 96.
8. On the conversazione, see A. Quondam, La conversazione: Un modello italiano (Rome:
Donzelli Editore, 2007).
9. A remarkable synthesis of the complex problem concerning the papal reform of the
calendar and the protests by Protestants it brought about is offered by J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in
the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,
1999), pp. 24–46.
10. The most important scholarly contributions in this field are by Ugo Baldini. See his
fundamental essay, “Legem impone subactis: Teologia, filosofia e scienze matematiche nella
didattica e nella dottrina della Compagnia di Gesù (1550–1630),” in Ugo Baldini, Legem impone
subactis. Studi su filosofia e scienza dei gesuiti in Italia. 1540–1632 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992),
pp. 19–73; as well as “L’insegnamento della matematica nel collegio di S. Antão a Lisbona (1590–
1640),” in Ugo Baldini, Saggi sulla cultura della Compagnia di Gesù (secoli XVI–XVIII) (Padova:
CLEUP Editrice, 2000), pp. 129–167.
11. On the abbaco school, see P. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and
Learning 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), mainly pp. 311–319;
E. Ulivi, “Scuole d’abaco e insegnamento della matematica,” in Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa,
vol. 5: Le scienze, ed. A. Clericuzio, G. Ernst, and M. Conforti (Treviso-Costabissara: Angelo
Colla Editore, 2008), pp. 403–442.
12. Ms. by Hieronimus Torres, Orden de la lectura de mathematicas, Codices Romani Stud.
2, f. 200, in Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale “Vittorio Emanuele,” Mss Ges. 1433; also in Monumenta
Paedagogica, ed. Cecilio Gomex Rodeles et al. (Madrid: Agustin Avrial, 1901), p. 478. On Ricci’ s
mathematical books in Chinese, see C. Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning
and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), pp. 25–26.
13. On this problem, see M. Redaelli, Il mappamondo con la Cina al centro: Fonti antiche e
mediazione culturale nell’opera di Matteo Ricci, S.J. (Pisa: Edizioni ETS), pp. 94–95.
14. “Poiché in ogni modo i libri che il Provinciale avesse da dar licentia, avriano d’esser
revisti e approvati solo da quei che sanno le lettere e la lingua cinica; secondariamente perché i
libri che qua facciamo non sono nove cose, ma tutto pigliamo di nostri libri quello che ci viene
qui a proposito per la Cina e solum interponimus iudicium in seligendo.” Epistle dated August 15,
1606, in Matteo Ricci, Lettere: 1580–1609 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2001), p. 429.
15. See Kiyoshi Yabuuti, Une histoire des mathématiques chinoises, trans. by C. Jami (Paris:
Belin, 2000), pp. 124–130.
16. Georg Schurhammer, Die Zeitgenossischen Quellen zur Geschichte Portugiesisch-Asiens
und seiner Nachbarlander (Rome: IHSI, 1962), p. 322. See also Manuel Cadafaz de Matos,
“Humanismo e evangelização no Oriente no século XVI,” ICALP 7–8 (1987), 41–72, see
pp. 67–69.
Features 9
Who Was Homer Lea (1876–1912), and Why Should We Care?
Myth and History in the “American Century”
Lawrence M. Kaplan. Homer Lea: American Soldier of Fortune. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2010. x, 314 pp. Hardcover $40.00, isbn
978-0-8131-2616-6.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Homer Lea (1876–1912), whose short but full life ended a century ago, shared the
stage with Sun Yat-sen at a critical moment in modern Chinese history: the early
days of the Republic of China in Nanjing. Sun and Lea, who sailed together from
France, reached Shanghai in December 1911 with a vision for China that scarcely
accommodated the complexities of those final months of the Qing dynasty. A
decade earlier, Homer Lea had dreamed of occupying center stage with Kang
Youwei and the emperor of China; in 1942, thirty years after his death, the significance of his life and work was revisited, recreated, and reimagined in ways that
resonated with a stunned America in the first weeks and months after Japan’s
attack at Pearl Harbor.
When Lea landed at Shanghai in 1911, it was not the first time he had been in
East Asia. In 1900, he had sailed from San Francisco in hopes of aiding Kang
Youwei’s violent effort to restore to power the Guangxu emperor, whose reforming
impulses had been checked by the empress dowager in 1898. Kang Youwei needed
guns for his men in Guangdong and the mid-Yangzi provinces, and it was to Lea
that he turned for guns and the training of troops.1 Lea, undaunted by his failures
in 1900 — neither guns were obtained nor troops trained — had sought to train and
drill young Chinese men living in Los Angeles in 1904–1905 at the Western Military Academy. In this period, Lea also helped organize the visit of Liang Qichao,
Kang’s ally, to Los Angeles (1903), and he traveled in 1905 with Kang Youwei on his
high-profile visits to Washington, DC (where they met with President Theodore
Roosevelt), New York, Philadelphia, and other American cities with large populations of Chinese overseas. While completing a book about military affairs in 1909,
Lea also conspired to raise money and troops for a mercenary army that he hoped
would invade South China and topple the Qing dynasty.
Like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen needed as many Western
allies as possible, and Lea’s growing reputation as a military strategist, when combined with his revolutionary credentials, gained him access. Sun, having worked
together with Lea in the United States in 1910, met Lea again in London in the fall
of 1911 after the beginning of the 1911 Revolution. In London, and then in Paris,
Lea and Sun sought the government backing, both diplomatic and financial, that
the revolution needed. Doors were opened, but neither promises nor money was
obtained. En route to China, Lea, who had been informing reporters and the U.S.
Department of State that he would be Sun’s military chief of staff, was forced by
circumstances and U.S. neutrality laws to relinquish this dream. He continued,
10 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
however, to be called General Homer Lea by the press, although clearly with a
sense of irony in some cases ( p. 178). But it was Sun’s revolutionary ally Huang
Xing, not the one-time Stanford student and now-acclaimed author of the military
treatise The Valor of Ignorance (1909), which had warned of an impending Japanese attack on America, who would be assigned the military portfolio in Sun’s
short-lived cabinet.2
Sun Yat-sen ceded his position as provisional president to Yuan Shikai, the
northern-based Qing official and military leader, whose Republican presidency
was supported by both revolutionaries and reformers alike. Sun returned to his
ambitious schemes for modernizing China. Homer Lea, who had suffered a debilitating stroke the day before the abdication of the Qing emperor on February 12,
1912, returned to America with his new bride, Ethel Powers, who had been his
secretary intermittently during the previous five years.
Many have asked for more than a century, who was Homer Lea? Lawrence
Kaplan has addressed that question in his new biography, which follows Lea from
childhood to his early death in 1912. Kaplan admits that “many questions remain
about Lea’s exploits and the full extent of his influence [but] there can be no doubt
that Homer Lea left an indelible mark on the history of his times” ( p. 214). But why
is the simple question “Who was Homer Lea?” so difficult to answer? Homer Lea
died on November 1, 1912, and shortly thereafter, his wife burned most of his
correspondence, documents, and notes. Some say the cash-strapped widow, who
had to move out of the house they had been renting, could not manage so much
material; others say she and Lea’s colleagues knew how much of the material
documented activities that were either illegal or nearly so ( p. 189).3 Surviving
documents, especially those identified with Sun Yat-sen, were kept by Ethel until
her death in 1934 — she had been working on a biography of her late husband
( p. 200) — and in 1968, these were donated by the Powers family to the Hoover
Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace (Joshua B. Powers Papers) ( p. 208).
After their mother’s death, both Joshua and Alfred were careful stewards and
enterprising advocates for the historical significance of their stepfather’s life.
Neither brother seems to have questioned Lea’s honorific “general,” first used in
1901 after Lea’s return from Asia in publicity such as the April 21, 1901, headline for
a story written by Lea titled “How I Was Made a General in the Chinese Army”
that ran in the weekend magazine section of the San Francisco Call.
As we will see, there is still no convincing evidence that corroborates the
claims made in Lea’s article and its sidebars, and yet the basic story and subsequent
embellishments came to be accepted by some as true. Lawrence Kaplan, who sides
with those who have believed Lea’s basic story, documents some of the myth-­
making and tries to isolate small kernels of truth. His book-length biography, the
first one in which Homer Lea gets sole billing, builds on more than a century of
work by a parade of chroniclers, beginning with Homer Lea himself. The template
for the story was fashioned in the first decade of the twentieth century, a period in
Features 11
which America was coming to terms with its newly acquired Pacific empire. In an
increasingly connected world, news from Asia in general and China in particular
was avidly sought and consumed. China mattered for economic reasons, and it
remained an object of interest and concern for missionaries, reformers, and revolutionaries eager to aid China’s entry into the family of civilized nations. In this
context, the Homer Lea saga developed. With Lea’s death and the apparently
mistaken prediction he had made about Japan’s threat to the United States, his
notoriety faded, but in the 1930s, as Japan and the United States began eyeing one
another with increasing suspicion, Lea’s warnings were reconsidered.
In 1939, five years after Ethel Powers’s death, Charles Kates, a U.S. Army
Reserve officer, began working with the materials she had saved and organized for
her planned biography of Homer Lea. Soon after Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor and
invasion of the Philippine Islands, Kates, with the permission of the Powers family,
shared his work with Clare Boothe ( p. 207), who added her own research in
turn-of-the-century newspaper and magazine files. Boothe’s work appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post in March 1942 ( pp. 205–206) and had been previewed in a
short unsigned piece, “Battle of America: Invasion of the United States?” in her
husband Henry Luce’s Time magazine’s December 29, 1941, issue.4 The only photo
accompanying this article was of Lea in a general’s uniform, circa 1905, not the one
custom made for him in London in the fall of 1911. Its caption read: “China’s
Homer Lea: He Could Not Wait.”5 Boothe also reintroduced Homer Lea to the
American reading public in Harper’s reissue in March 1942 of The Valor of Ignorance, in which she reminded readers in her short biography “The Valor of Homer
Lea” of his prevision of Japanese aggression. As Kaplan notes, Boothe repeated
“earlier misinformation and exaggerations about Lea” ( pp. 205–206). Carl Glick’s
1945 book about Lea’s Western Military Academy, Double Ten: Captain O’Banion’s
Story of the Chinese Revolution, did not help. This book continued the effort by the
Powers brothers, begun with Charles Kates, to enlist writers to burnish Homer
Lea’s credentials. It was Alfred Powers who had introduced Glick to Captain
O’Banion. Later, Kates, burdened with postwar responsibilities, urged Glick to take
on the Lea biography, but Glick declined ( pp. 207–208).
Kates continued his project with a diligent Harvard undergraduate and future
U.S. diplomat, Frederic L. Chapin. Chapin submitted his 145-page thesis “Homer
Lea and the Chinese Revolution” on April 12, 1950; it was read closely by one of
Chapin’s professors, John King Fairbank. In appendix 1, where Chapin wrestles
with the question of when Lea and Sun first met, Fairbank wrote: “[T]his note is
too condensed and so unclear. . . . Set up the variant stories. . . . Use more space
and quote more.”6 Fairbank, who trained generations of China scholars at Harvard,
had approved, the year before, Joseph Levenson’s dissertation on Liang Qichao.7
Levenson, who served as a teaching fellow and tutor in Harvard’s history department (1946–1948) and then was admitted to the Society of Fellows at Harvard
while Chapin was working on his thesis, cited the work of Chapin and Kates in
12 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
his Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (1953), in a passage about the
“Falkenberg Affair.” This controversy, which led to U.S. government investigations,
erupted in 1903–1905 when Homer Lea and Richard Falkenberg vied for Liang
Qichao’s and Kang Youwei’s blessing to lead an effort to train and drill young
Chinese living in major American cities.
Fairbank’s and Levenson’s fleeting attention in the early 1950s to Homer Lea
marked the high point of interest in him by scholars of modern Chinese history.
For their part, Kates and Chapin abandoned their valiant effort to find the real
Homer Lea. Kates, who tried to improve Chapin’s thesis and to find a publisher,
wrote to Ethel’s son Joshua on 20 September 1955: “There is a great lack of personal
information about Lea, as well as serious gaps in the chronology of his life”
( p. 208). Nonetheless, scholars outside the field of modern Chinese history
remained undaunted.
Homer Lea studies became the province of military historians, such as Lawrence Kaplan, and scholars in Asian American studies. The topic also intrigued
researchers such as Eugene Anschel, a German-born writer whose still-valuable
Homer Lea, Sun Yat-sen, and the Chinese Revolution (1984) was based in part on
the Joshua B. Powers papers. In the same year, using much of the same Westernlanguage materials, the academic Key Ray Chong published Americans and
­Chinese Reform and Revolution, 1898–1922. This post-1950 work usually followed
in the footsteps of Kates and Chapin and consulted new material, but there was a
tendency also to retrace their steps and return to the turn-of-the-century periodical literature and hearsay-strewn secondary literature of the pre-1950 period. This
practice was fraught with risk, as Joseph Levenson had warned in 1953. For
­example, he called Carl Glick’s 1945 book about Lea and his exploits, an as-told-to
book based on the forty-year-old memories of Lea’s colleague Captain Ansel E.
O’Banion, “so fantastically garbled that, in the absence of corroborative evidence,
little credence can be given to any of its author’s statements.”8
Kaplan’s biography follows its antecedents in many ways, although he does
insist that the sources mentioned above, plus those now available on the Internet,
finally allow us to separate fact from fiction and move Lea studies forward. He has,
indeed, located much new material from archives, the periodical press, and family
histories. Unfortunately, Kaplan’s characterization of Anschel’s book — “His
­biographical account contained numerous historical errors and continued to
perpetuate several Lea myths” ( p. 209) — could be applied to his new biography of
Lea. It both obscures and clarifies Homer Lea’s life. Anschel’s book, which has the
merit of using the methodology urged by Fairbank on Chapin — gives variant
versions of stories and quotes liberally — should still be consulted.
How are we to evaluate this new biography of Homer Lea? Unlike Chapin
and Anschel, Kaplan does not appear to have shared his manuscript with China
scholars who might have helped him avert some mistakes and misunderstandings.
Kaplan’s use of some of the standard English-language sources helped, but he
Features 13
never used them at the expense of the story he wanted to tell, which was the same
story Lea himself had told. His Homer Lea, American soldier of fortune, needs to
become a lieutenant general in Kang Youwei’s so-called Baohuanghui (Protect-theemperor society) army in 1900 to train soldiers in Guangdong and Guangxi and to
try to restore the Guangxu emperor to power ( pp. 3–4). In chapter 3, “A Don
Quixote in China,” Kaplan sketches these activities in 1900 and claims that Lea
“apparently” ( p. 47) also made it as far as Henan Province before giving up on his
effort to rescue the emperor from the grasp of the empress dowager.
Did Lea really do all this? Lea did travel to Asia under the auspices of the San
Francisco branch of Kang Youwei’s Baohuanghui during the summer of the Boxer
Uprising of 1900, he may have talked with agents of Kang Youwei and Liang
Qichao in Macao, and his landing at Hong Kong was reported by the press,9 but
no persuasive evidence that he was in China, let alone serving as a general and
leading troops, has come to light. In addition to press coverage, we know Lea did
reach the Hong Kong–Macao region because the crown colony’s governor Henry
Blake informed London about Lea’s plotting there to raise an invasion force to
attack Canton. As Kaplan tells us, Blake called Lea’s plan “mere vapouring” ( p. 44).
Kaplan does not present enough evidence to overturn the scholarly consensus
that Lea’s closest approach to the Qing empire was Macao and Hong Kong, the
Portuguese- and British-held territories in South China. Jane Leung Larson, the
granddaughter of one of Kang Youwei’s (and Lea’s) Los Angeles allies, Tan
­Zhangxiao (1875–1931), in her fine collection of letters between Tan, Kang, and
other members of the Chinese Empire Reform Association (also known as the
Protect-the-Emperor Society), wrote in 1992: “There is no verifiable evidence that
Lea got to China or led troops there in the 1900 uprising.”10 Larson, who expressed
the consensus view put forward by Anschel and Chong, did not convince Kaplan,
who otherwise made excellent use of this underappreciated treasure trove of
correspondence.11
Kaplan interweaves these documents with another family history, that of Kang
Youwei. Like the Lea/Powers family, Kang Youwei’s family also preserved documents and sought to advance Kang’s centrality in the histories written of this
period. Kang Youwei’s autobiography, which ends in 1898 after the collapse of the
reform movement, was supplemented through the efforts of his devoted daughter
Tongbi and her son, Luo Rongbang (Lo Jung-pang). In their influential collaboration, Luo and his mother drew on Kang’s writings and an extensive range of other
primary and secondary sources. The focus for their narrative of 1900, much like
standard accounts such as Li Jiannong’s The Political History of China, 1840–1928
(1948), is Tang Caichang’s mid-Yangzi uprising. Kaplan draws on Luo’s work,
although he does not mention Tang Caichang by name. Instead, Kaplan conflates
Tang’s uprising with whatever actions Kang’s allies were taking in Guangdong.
Thus, in Kaplan’s account Tang’s military forces, which were styled the Independence Army (Zili jun), march as the “Pao Huang Hui’s military force at Hankow.”
14 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Kaplan, with Homer Lea as a guide, does challenge the conventional historio­
graphy of 1900, which associates Kang Youwei with Tang Caichang’s Yangzi plot
and Sun Yat-sen with various Guangdong plots. But Kang Youwei wrote a letter
dated June 27, 1900, to Tan Zhangxiao that suggests Kang’s connection to insurrectionary actions in Guangdong:
Now there are many Westerners who wish to join us in our campaign. . . . Firearms are, however, in short supply, and the districts in the Yangzi and Guangdong
need more than we can supply. Now the date for the uprising has been decided
[August 9]. I reckon that when my letter arrives, our troops should have started
moving.12
Neither Kang nor his biographers explained the Guangdong-Yangzi connection in
his plans, but Lea talked about his actions in Guangdong and the mid-Yangzi as
related, and Kaplan follows his line. Although it does not appear that Lea did
anything in South and Central China, the letter just quoted is evidence that Kang
Youwei contemplated a multiprovince uprising. In Guangdong, both Kang Youwei
and Sun Yat-sen were competing for combatants; Sun was much more successful.
While their respective strategies diverged after 1900, on the ground in 1900 there
was little to distinguish between Sun’s revolution and Kang’s restoration. Both
Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen urged their followers to use violence against the
empress dowager.
Lea’s later understanding of the confusing events of 1900, which was added to
what he learned in Asia in 1900, may have been informed by Kang’s June 27, 1900,
letter to Tan quoted above. We do know that Kang Youwei had become frustrated
with Lea by mid-1901. In a letter dated July 5, 1901, Kang wrote to Tan:
Kong Ma Li [Homer Lea] does not understand our internal situation, and his idea
is not feasible. . . . [I]t costs us several thousand dollars for Kong Ma Li, who was
of no help to us. . . . Kong Ma Li’s words are merely like someone talking in his
sleep ( pp. 59–60).
Based on what we know about the events of 1900, the only part of Kaplan’s
­Baohuanghui army that mobilized is the Independence Army associated with Tang
Caichang’s ill-fated Independence Society (Zili hui). Tang and his associates
planned an uprising in the central and lower Yangzi region that was discovered
and brutally suppressed by Zhang Zhidong and his fellow Qing officials in August
1900. Funded by a Chinese overseas businessman in Singapore who supported
Kang’s efforts, the four-port uprising broke out prematurely in the Anhui port city
of Datong. (Kaplan confuses [p. 46] this Yangzi port, midway between Nanjing in
Jiangsu Province and Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province, with the landlocked northern
city of Datong in Shanxi Province.) Kaplan claims, citing Luo Rongbang, in his
discussion of Kang’s plans for 1900 that “Lea was slated to play a minor but potentially significant role with the overall reform plan: his mission was to help generate
this grassroots support” ( pp. 44–45). Luo makes no such statement; this characterization, it would appear, is an uncorroborated claim of Lea’s alone.13
Features 15
Although Kaplan’s account of this era is incomplete, it does merit attention.
With the caution prompted by “A Don Quixote in China” one can still glean some
useful information from Kaplan’s account of Lea’s post-1900 activities; Kaplan does
return to the documentary collections used earlier by scholars, and he has identified new sources as well. This is particularly true of his work on the Chinese
militia-training organization styled the Western Military Academy, branches of
which could be found in major American cities (chapters 4–7). It is stirring to
imagine, in a California still marred by anti-Asian discrimination in early
­twentieth-century America, Lea’s Chinese cadets marching proudly in the 1905
Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena ( pp. 83–85). Furthermore, it is striking
to learn, in Kaplan’s telling of the Red Dragon conspiracy of 1909–1910 (chapter 9),
how hubristic and gullible American men with money and influence could be in
this period, with their visions of sponsoring mercenary forces that would revolutionize China and guarantee them access to the China market. Nothing came of
this plan, but conspirators were bold enough to approach J. P. Morgan ( p. 153). It
was not that difficult for Homer Lea to persuade his fellow conspirators, who
would have known how a group of American businessmen in Hawai‘i had been
part of the effort (1893–1898) to prod the American government into annexing the
islands.
It is unlikely that Homer Lea’s short life and checkered career would be
remembered in the centenary year of his death had not the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor in 1941. Homer Lea’s anti-Japanese bias in The Valor of Ignorance,
combined with a career record that displayed an interest in, if not respect for, the
Chinese, matched the American mood and needs of the 1940s. As we have seen,
within three months of Pearl Harbor, Clare Boothe Luce would be championing to
a national audience Lea and his geopolitical vision, first announced in 1909 in his
The Valor of Ignorance, a call for America to arm and mobilize in the face of a
threat across the Pacific, Japan, that would soon, he argued, threaten America’s
newly acquired Pacific possessions — the Philippines, Guam, and Hawai‘i — and,
from the mid-Pacific, the western coast of America.
In an age in which militaries around the world were just beginning to establish the general staffs that would engage in war planning, Lea single-handedly
wrote a well-received and influential war plan of his own. Lieutenant General
Adna R. Chaffee, who had led U.S. forces in China during the Boxer Uprising and
had written an enthusiastic introduction to The Valor of Ignorance, was army chief
of staff when Japan attacked Russia in 1904. General Chaffee asked America’s
recently established (1903) general staff, the Joint Army-Navy Board,14 for a war
plan. This request led, years later, to War Plan ORANGE, which “provided the
strategic concept and missions to be followed in the event of war with that nation
[i.e., Japan].”15
However, the effort first initiated by General Chaffee yielded only a statement
of principles; we can imagine Chaffee’s delight when, several years later, he read
16 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Lea’s manuscript. Lea had written a detailed war plan, albeit from the perspective
of a Japanese general staff (Japan had established a general staff in 1879),16 that
greatly impressed Chaffee. But Chaffee was also responding to the militarism in
Lea’s book. In his introduction to The Valor of Ignorance, Chaffee had called for a
mobilized America with national conscription for men and women.17 In 1942, as
Chaffee’s introduction was included in the March 1942 reissue of Lea’s book, his
words were no longer ignored.
Clare Boothe, whose work informed the December 1941 Time article “Battle of
America: An Invasion of the U.S.?” discussed Homer Lea’s assessment about a
potential threat to Hawai‘i posed by Japanese immigrants, many of whom, he
thought, had arrived in Hawai‘i with military training. There was no time to waste.
In his detailed forty-three-page war plan of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast,
he estimated that Japan could transport two hundred thousand troops to America
in four weeks.18 The Time article appeared in the newly designated section “World
Battlefronts” and was paired with “Battle of China.”19 The article highlighted and
updated Lea’s concern that “Hawaii . . . would be assaulted from within by the
1909 version of a fifth column.” This worry was soon addressed when President
Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, issued Executive Order 9066, which
triggered the forced relocation of Japanese living in California, Oregon, and
Washington. Although Lea’s plan made no mention of the espionage and sabotage
feared by Roosevelt, table 2 of his 1909 book, which was also published in the 1942
Harper’s reissue, contained the following passage from a memorial adopted in
Seattle in February 1908 by the Asiatic Exclusion League of North America:
The living in our midst of a large body of Asiatics, the greatest number of whom
are armed, loyal to their governments, entertaining feelings of distrust, if not of
hostility, to our people, without any allegiance to our government or our institutions, not sustaining American life in times of peace, and ever ready to respond to
the cause of their own nations in times of war, make these Asiatics an appalling
menace to the American Republic, the splendid achievements wrought by the
strong arms and loyal hearts of Caucasian toilers, patriots and heroes in every
walk of life.20
Like Lea’s plan, a 1938 version of the U.S. military’s War Plan ORANGE, as summarized by Louis Morton, did not address the potential for espionage and sabotage by
Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens living on the West Coast. Executive Order
9066, issued four years later, did.21
With respect to China, careful observers in the 1940s might have noted a
parallel between the convictions of Lea, who had convinced Sun Yat-sen that he
should be his chief of staff, and General Joseph Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek’s military
advisor and chief of staff, who insisted that China’s military fate would be most
secure if its troops were commanded by an American general. This became the
most contentious issue between Chiang and Stilwell, leading to President Roosevelt’s recall of Stilwell in October 1944.22
Features 17
Clare Boothe saw the significance of Homer Lea’s life and work in even
grander terms. America, which had been assured by Roosevelt in his Fireside Chat
of December 29, 1940, that the United States need only be the “the great arsenal of
democracy,” saw the world anew after December 7, 1941. Now, in an America
needing men and arms, Boothe reimagined Lea as an inspirational “soldier of
Democracy” who had recognized that China, not Japan, would be America’s
“democratic ally” in Asia.23 She ends her biography with a flight of fancy clearly
connected to the present crisis: Might not Sun Yat-sen, after he was inaugurated
the provisional president of the Republic of China in 1912 with Homer Lea standing nearby, have looked out over the Nanjing reception hall and seen Chiang
Kai-shek and Soong Meiling?24 In fact, Chiang and Madame Chiang (Soong
Meiling) did not meet until 1921, and Chiang had yet to meet Sun, but Time’s 1937
Man and Woman of the Year need not worry about facts when these were dwarfed
by myths.25 In the very dark days of early 1942, when the Japanese empire was still
expanding, Boothe cast Lea as a seer whose vision of a strategic United States–
China relationship, which she dated to 1900, would now be realized. Boothe then
described the ailing Lea sitting before the “wide sunny Pacific” spreading before
his “sightless eyes.” And yet he “saw, as in a great white horrible light, the bombs
bursting over Pearl Harbor . . . and the dawn coming up like thunder out of
China.” Homer Lea’s “unfinished work,” Boothe promised, would now be completed by China and America.26
Homer Lea was resurrected in an extraordinary time of national crisis. His
lonely and quixotic crusade at the turn of the century had become the cause of a
generation. Kaplan documents in fascinating detail the range of post-1942 interest
in Homer Lea’s life, including plans in Hollywood and New York to bring the Lea
story to movie and TV screens. Now, perhaps, we can better understand why, in
1948 ( p. 242 n. 20), as America was watching its wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek lose
his battle with the Chinese Communists, Frederic Chapin thought Homer Lea
might be an interesting thesis topic. The fascination continues, most recently, in
the People’s Republic of China, where Homer Lea shared the movie screen with
Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing, played by Jackie Chan, in Zhang Li’s epic production
1911, released in 2011 to mark the revolution’s centenary.27
Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Sun Yat-sen — revolutionaries who could not
risk living in China — desperately needed money, arms, and diplomatic support to
achieve their goals. All three men were willing to sacrifice Chinese sovereignty, if
necessary. They needed Western and Japanese allies; they needed the support of
Chinese overseas. Someone like Homer Lea, with his promises of access to men of
power, influence, and money, was a welcome and absolutely necessary ally. The
power elites of the great powers included those who promoted imperial adventures
and others who abhorred them. Moreover, none of the great powers trusted one
another, whether in Europe or Asia. Homer Lea negotiated these treacherous
waters with skill, spirit, and intelligence. In Kaplan’s book, we learn more about
18 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Lea as well as about Americans trying to understand and shape a confusing new
world.
What Lea could not have anticipated, and what makes this strange story even
stranger, is the way in which the contingencies of history brought Homer Lea back
to the center stage he so loved and relished, a posthumous encore performance of
an imaginary role that, for reasons of national security, was presented as real. After
years of an informal alliance between the United States and Chiang Kai-shek’s
Republic of China — a world with secrets and subterfuge that would have been
familiar to Lea — in 1942 the U.S. military was openly aiding the Chinese and
planning to fight with the Chinese against Japan. Neither Lea nor the United States
followed such policies for purely altruistic reasons. Furthermore, their various
Chinese allies had designs and goals of their own, but Lea’s implicit call for this
strategic relationship in East Asia, implicit because it can be discerned only by
analyzing both his actions and his thoughts, is a call whose story is worth telling.
Roger R. Thompson
Roger R. Thompson is a professor of history at Western Washington University,
specializing in late Qing and early Republican institutional history.
For an informative discussion and analysis of the term the “American Century,” see Hunt,
Notes
pp. 232–234. Luce’s famous February 1941 editorial in Life is reprinted in Hogan, pp. 11–29.
Michael J. Hogan, editor of Diplomatic History, commissioned a series of essays about Luce’s
“American Century” that was published in the journal in spring 1999. Revised essays, and Hogan’s
introduction, appeared in his The Ambiguous Legacy: U. S. Foreign Relations in the “American
Century” (1999). Hogan writes of Luce’s editorial: “[It] urged the American people to accept their
destiny and use their influence to remake the world according to their own values.” See Hogan,
p. 1.
I thank Edward Rhoads, Charles Schencking, Jonathan Spence, Louis Truschel, and Melissa
Walt for reading and commenting on various drafts of this essay. I thank also China Review
International’s managing editor, Nicholas Hudson, for his suggestions and support, and also for
encouraging me to develop my review into a “Features” essay.
1. Tang Zhijun, one of the foremost Chinese scholars of this period, related this to Jane
Leung Larson, in an interview she conducted in December 1990. See Jane Leung Larson, “New
Source Materials on Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui: The Tan Zhangxiao (Tom Leung)
Collection of Letters and Documents at UCLA’s East Asian Library,” Chinese America: History
and Perspectives, Journal of the Chinese Historical Society of America 7 (1993): 188 n. 40. According
to the Hong Kong correspondent of the newly established Daily Express (London), quoted in the
Chicago Tribune of August 4, 1900, upon his arrival in Hong Kong Lea claimed to have money
that the correspondent thought would “presumably be utilized in connection with the revolutionary movement against the Empress Dowager, a movement quiescent since 1898 until within the
last few weeks.” See “Reformer from America,” Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1900.
2. Howard L. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 196.
Features 19
3. Eugene Anschel, Homer Lea, Sun Yat-sen, and the Chinese Revolution (New York: Praeger,
1984), p. xiv.
4. “Battle of America: Invasion of the United States?” Time, December 29, 1941, pp. 18–19.
Kaplan cites this article ( p. 277 n. 87), but does not discuss its content or manner of presentation.
He gives an incorrect citation: Time, December 23, 1941, pp. 8–19 ( p. 287).
5. For Lea’s custom-made London uniform see Anschel, p. 163. Time used the photograph of
Lea that accompanied the March 1912 Strand article by Sun Yat-sen titled “My Reminiscences.”
This photo ( p. 304) is titled “General Homer Lea, Sun Yat Sen’s Chief Military Adviser.” Another
photograph, almost certainly taken in the same studio sitting, had been published in the occasional “Unconventional Portrait” series in The Bookman in its June 1908 issue on p. 338. Kaplan
uses this photo on his title page, dating it to about 1905. (Kaplan’s citation — The Bookman, April
1908, p. 130 — is incorrect; he gives the correct citation, and describes the uniform and its medals,
at p. 268 n. 73.)
6. Frederic L. Chapin, appendix 1, p. 114.
7. John K. Fairbank. “J. R. L. — Getting Started,” in The Mozartian Historian: Essays on the
Works of Joseph R. Levenson, ed. Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphey (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976), p. 28; Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphey, eds. The Mozartian
Historian: Essays on the Works of Joseph R. Levenson (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), p. 195.
8. Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2nd. rev. ed., 1959; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967),
p. 75 n. 75. Citations are to the University of California Press reprint.
9. Homer Lea’s arrival in Hong Kong was noted by the Hong Kong correspondent of the
Daily Express and contains details that correlate with Lea’s preparations in America. In the April
22, 1900, issue of the San Francisco Call, the Chinese consul general in San Francisco, who was
shown, before publication, the front-page story about Lea, characterizes Lea as a “young
­American citizen . . . plotting with the leaders among the Chinese revolutionists. . . . It is unfortunate that an American should submit to be made the tool of the insurrectionists, under the guise
of reforming China. . . . [I]f [an insurrection is] ever attempted these people will find themselves
well met at every step.” See Kaplan, appendix B, p. 216. A month later, a front-page headline in the
San Francisco Call’s June 22, 1900, issue announced: “Homer Lea, a Stanford Student, Sails for
China with a Big Sum of Money Collected for the Purpose of Raising an Army to Outwit the
Empress Dowager.” The article identified Lea as a Baohuanghui secret agent with $60,000 ( p. 39).
In Hong Kong, Lea’s story was similar, although he was called the “resident agent in the United
States of the Society for the Reformation of the Chinese Empire.” Also, in Hong Kong the 60,000
U.S. dollars became 60,000 British pounds. The correspondent presumed this money would be
used for “the revolutionary movement against the Empress Dowager.” See “Reformer from
America,” Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1900.
10. Larson, “New Source Materials,” p. 158.
11. Lyon Sharman, in her 1934 book on Sun Yat-sen, argues that Lea went no further than
Hong Kong and Macao, “exhausted his funds,” and had to be furnished passage home to California. See Lyon Sharmon, Sun Yat-sen, His Life and Its Meaning: A Critical Biography (New York:
John Day, 1934; reprint with introduction by Lyman P. Van Slyke, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 90 ( page citation is to the 1968 edition). Marius Jansen, writing about the
Huizhou Uprising in Guangdong Province in 1900, says of Lea’s claim that he was a participant
20 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
(which Kaplan does not advance): “The writings of Sun Yat-sen and the Japanese who were
involved do not support this view.” See Marius B. Jansen, The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen
­(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 247 n. 38. Harold Schriffin’s forty-page
account of the uprising, based on Chinese- and English-language sources, including contemporary diplomatic and newspaper reporting, corroborates Jansen’s survey of the Japanese sources.
See Harold Z. Schriffin, Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 214–254. In a letter dated March 2, 1982, Eugene Anschel asked
Schriffin about his position; Schriffin said that he “was not at all certain that Lea was in China in
the summer of 1900.” See Anschel, p. 223 n. 5. Kaplan did locate a “Greetings from Canton”
postcard with a note to his sister Ermal, still held by the Lea family. But he notes that the postcard
is undated, which suggests it lacked a postmark ( p. 231 n. 20). This is the only new archival
evidence and, given that it is not an independent corroboration of Lea’s presence in China, it is
not enough, in my judgment, to overturn the scholarly consensus on this point.
12. Larson, “New Source Materials,” p. 163.
13. Kaplan is citing Lo Jung-pang [Luo Rongbang], ed. and trans., K’ang Yu-wei: A Bio­
graphy and Symposium (Tucson: Association for Asian Studies, University of Arizona Press,
1967), p. 186. For Luo’s narrative of 1900 see pp. 184–187.
14. Dallas D. Irvine, “The Origins of Capital Staffs,” Journal of Modern History 10, no. 2
(June 1938): 178.
15. Louis Morton, “War Plan Orange: Evolution of a Strategy,” World Politics 11, no. 2
(January 1959): 222.
16. Irvine, “The Origins of Capital Staff,” p. 178 n. 48.
17. Clare Boothe, “The Valor of Homer Lea,” a biographical sketch written for the 1942
reprinting of Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909; repr.,
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), p. xliv. Citations to the 1942 reprint.
18. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909; repr., New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), pp. 178–220. For Lea’s estimate of the trans-Pacific troop-­
transport time see Lea, p. 181. Citations are to the 1942 reprint.
19. See Time, December 22, 1941, p. 9, for the announcement of the department “World
Battlefronts,” which would present “[a]n integrated story of the actual fighting by both the U.S.
and its Allies.”
20. Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, table 2, pp. 223–225. Quoted material, pp. 224–225.
21. Morton, “War Plan Orange,” pp. 248–249. For the background and implementation of
Executive Order 9066, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in
Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 748–760.
22. Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New
York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 502.
23. Boothe, “The Valor of Homer Lea,” p. xxv; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, pp. 468–469.
Clare Boothe’s argument was anticipated by Henry Luce’s Life magazine “American Century”
editorial of February 1941. Quoting Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” locution, Luce argued that
America had no choice but to fight in Europe and Asia. In the editorial section “America is in the
War,” Luce suggested that after a Hitler triumph in Europe, his Asian ally, Japan, “might then
attack the South Seas and the Philippines. We could abandon Philippines, abandon Australia and
New Zealand, and withdraw to Hawaii.” See Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” in The
Ambiguous Legacy: U. S. Foreign Relations in the “American Century,” ed. Michael J. Hogan (New
Features 21
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Life editorial first published on February 17, 1941), p. 14.
Henry Luce did not mention Chiang Kai-shek or China in his editorial.
24. Boothe, “The Valor of Homer Lea,” p. xxxvi.
25. Chiang, who was still in Shanghai, did not meet Sun until December 1913. See Jay
Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 27, 61.
26. Boothe, “The Valor of Homer Lea,” p. xxxvii. In her biography of Lea, and in the Time
article, Boothe claims that Sun and Lea met in 1900 when Sun learned of Lea’s military brilliance
and Lea “offered to throw in his lot with me.” See Boothe, “The Valor of Homer Lea,” p. xxv.
Boothe is quoting from or paraphrasing the March 1912 Strand article by Sun Yat-sen titled “My
Reminiscences.” This passage can be found at p. 304 in the Strand article. Kaplan gives no
credence to this account; he located in the Charles O. Kates Papers a 1939 letter to Kates from the
pioneering Sun Yat-sen biographer Lyon Sharman, in which she concludes that “Lea was the
author or main collaborator of this article.” See Kaplan, p. 266 n. 58. We do not know if Kates
shared Sharman’s suspicion with Clare Boothe in 1941–1942. Frederic Chapin had access to the
Sharman letter, which he referred to in appendix 1 of his thesis. See Chapin, “Homer Lea and the
Chinese Revolution,” p. 113.
It is not improbable that the title for Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby’s best-selling
Thunder out of China (1946) came from Boothe’s Lea biography. White credits Harry Scherman,
president of the Book-of-the-Month Club. See Theodore H. White In Search of History: A
Personal Adventure (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 254. But given the national attention
paid (Kaplan, p. 277 n. 87) to Harper’s 1942 reissue of The Valor of Ignorance, Scherman, whether
knowingly or not, may have been echoing Boothe’s stirring words published four years earlier.
27. Homer Lea appears in four scenes and speaks in two. Lea watches Sun at a U.S. fundraiser in 1911, and also learns from Sun in a later scene why he is fighting for a revolution. The
third scene, from December 1911, is in Shanghai, when Lea, after reminding Sun that he had
predicted this outcome, hurries off to witness the voting that will make Sun provisional president.
In the fourth scene, Homer Lea is the only Westerner in a sea of revolutionary dignitaries
listening to Sun’s inaugural speech in Nanjing on New Year’s Day 1912.
ReferenceS
Anschel, Eugene. Homer Lea, Sun Yat-sen, and the Chinese Revolution. New York: Praeger, 1984.
“Battle of America: Invasion of the U.S.?” Time 38, no. 26 (December 29, 1941): 18–19.
The Bookman: A Magazine of Literature and Life. New York.
Boorman, Howard L. Biographical Dictionary of Republican China. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1968.
Boothe, Clare. “The Valor of Homer Lea.” A biographical sketch written for the 1942 reprinting of
Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, pp. ix–xxxviii. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942.
Chapin, Frederic L. “Homer Lea and the Chinese Revolution.” Undergraduate thesis, Harvard
University, April 12, 1950.
Chicago Tribune, “Reformer from America,” August 4, 1900.
Chong, Key Ray. Americans and Chinese Reform and Revolution, 1898–1922: The Role of Private
Citizens in Diplomacy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984.
Fairbank, John K. “J. R. L. — Getting Started.” In The Mozartian Historian: Essays on the Works of
Joseph R. Levenson, pp. 27–42. Edited by Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphey. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976.
22 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Glick, Carl. Double Ten: Captain O’Banion’s Story of the Chinese Revolution. New York: McGrawHill, 1945.
Hogan, Michael J., ed. The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the “American Century.”
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. (Commissioned articles first appearing in
Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 [Spring 1999].)
Hunt, Michael H. “East Asia in Henry Luce’s ‘American Century’.” In Michael J. Hogan, ed., The
Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the “American Century,” pp. 232–278. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Irvine, Dallas D. “The Origins of Capital Staffs.” Journal of Modern History 10, no. 2 (June 1938):
161–179.
Jansen, Marius B. The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.
Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Larson, Jane Leung. “New Source Materials on Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui: The Tan
Zhangxiao (Tom Leung) Collection of Letters and Documents at UCLA’s East Asian
Library.” Chinese America: History and Perspectives, Journal of the Chinese Historical Society
of America 7 (1993): 156–188.
Lea, Homer. “How I Was Made a General in the Chinese Army,” San Francisco Call, April 21, 1901.
—
——. The Valor of Ignorance. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909. Reprint, New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1942.
Levenson, Joseph R. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2d. rev. ed. (1959; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Originally published in 1953; citations are to the University of California Press reprint.
Li Chien-nung. See Li Jiannong.
Li Jiannong [Li Chien-nung]. The Political History of China, 1840–1928. Translated and edited
by Ssu-yu Teng and Jeremy Ingalls. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1956. Reprint,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967. The Chinese text used for this translation was
published in 1948. Citations are to the Stanford University Press edition.
Lo Jung-pang. See Luo Rongbang.
Luce, Henry R. “The American Century.” In Michael J. Hogan, ed., The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S.
Foreign Relations in the “American Century,” pp. 11–29. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999. (Life editorial first published on 17 February 1941.)
Luo Rongbang [Lo Jung-pang], ed. and trans. K’ang Yu-wei: A Biography and Symposium. Tucson:
Association for Asian Studies, University of Arizona Press, 1967.
Meisner, Maurice, and Rhoads Murphey, eds. The Mozartian Historian: Essays on the Works of
Joseph R. Levenson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Morton, Louis. “War Plan Orange: Evolution of a Strategy.” World Politics 11, no. 2 (January 1959):
221–250.
“Reformer from America,” Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1900.
San Francisco Call. San Francisco.
Schriffin, Harold Z. Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968.
Sharman, Lyon. Sun Yat-sen, His Life and Its Meaning: A Critical Biography. New York: John Day,
1934. Reprint, with an introduction by Lyman P. Van Slyke, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968.
Features 23
Sun Yat-sen. “My Reminiscences.” The Strand Magazine 43 (March 1912): 301–307.
Taylor, Jay. The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
Tuchman, Barbara W. Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
White, Theodore H. In Search of History: A Personal Adventure. New York: Harper and Row,
1978.
White, Theodore H., and Annalee Jacoby. Thunder out of China. New York: William Sloane
Associates, 1946.
Whose Hong Kong? Views and Movements Local and Global
Stanley S. K. Kwan with Nicole Kwan. The Dragon and the Crown: Hong
Kong Memoirs. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. xx, 215 pp.
Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-962-209-955-5.
Janet W. Salaff, Siu-lun Wong, and Arent Greve. Hong Kong Movers and
Stayers: Narratives of Family Migration. Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2010. viv, 259 pp. Hardcover $80.00, isbn 978-0-252-07704-3.
Leo Ou-fan Lee. City between Worlds: My Hong Kong. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008. 322 pp. Hardcover $29.95, isbn
978-0-674-02701-5.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
The three titles under review belong to markedly different genres of recent works
on Hong Kong. The first volume is a personal memoir by a key functionary of its
economy, the second is a collective volume by three sociologists delineating the
migratory experience of Hong Kong families, and the last is a reflective cultural
recognizance of the city by an intellectual historian and renowned scholar of
modern Chinese literature. All three books are by, for, and on Hong Kongers who
are endowed with nonlocal experiences and informed by external perspectives far
beyond Hong Kong. The Hong Kong — with all its images, scenes, sights, sounds,
persons, institutions, moments, events, processes, phenomena, and sentiments — that these authors have attempted to remember, observe, analyze, and
portray for the readers, emerges as a densely woven fabric of the historical and
contemporary place. Individually and collectively, they have combined to present
and convey to their readership, including Hong Kongers residing both in and
24 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
outside of the city, many fascinating facets, darker undersides, hidden dynamics,
rarely magnified realities, unwelcome truths, and unique personal insights to yield
a vividly engaging, three-dimensional, real-life Hong Kong story, or rather stories.
The Kwan Volume
The first book by banker Stanley Kwan (1925–2011), a third-generation Hong
Konger, spans almost a century, from the 1910s (when his uncle began work in a
Chinese native-bank [yinhao] in the colony that started the family tradition of
banking service that engaged his father and himself ), through his own experience
of growing up and working in Hong Kong ( punctuated with a 1942–1945 interlude
of wartime service in mainland China), to 2009, which closes with his reflections
on life as an immigrant in Toronto, Canada, since 1984, upon retirement from
Hang Seng Bank and thirteen years ahead of the city’s July 1, 1997, retrocession to
Chinese sovereignty. An earlier Chinese version of this volume was published in
1999 by the University of Toronto–York University Joint Centre for Asia Pacific
Studies. With the collaboration of his niece Nicole Kwan, an updated and much
expanded English version, the volume under review here, appeared a decade later,
as the sixth title in the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series with Hong
Kong University Press.
In the Kwan volume, readers are treated to a feast of continuously forward
moving sequences of richly textured and very direct firsthand narratives of persons, places, events, processes, and circumstances, not only of colonial Hong Kong
but also the China mainland and the East Asia–Pacific region as a whole that
shaped the life and work of the author and his extended family — grandparents,
parents, uncles and aunts, siblings, cousins, in-laws, and other close relatives who
have been dispersed over time across continents. Surfacing through the pages are
his friends, classmates, wartime comrades, American allies, Hong Kong banking
colleagues, and even, yes, Beijing’s united front functionaries and handlers (his
mainland tour guides). More than viewing specific developments and sweeping
trends from the perspective of the author’s individual or family experience, Kwan’s
storylines are often framed in a considerable broader historical context of modern
China’s tumultuous transformation from the late Qing dynasty, through the republican years, to the twists and turns under Communism of the Maoist phase, the
Dengist reform period, and its current global ascendancy.
Kwan’s account starts during the mid-nineteenth-century Opium Wars (that
yielded, among the other effects of Western imperialist assaults, British colonial
rule of Hong Kong in 1841) through wars and revolutions to his own 1984 migration to Canada. Settling in Toronto upon his retirement from Hong Kong banking
that preceded the domain’s 1997 retrocession to China, Kwan concludes his book’s
coverage with his life as a retiree. His post–Hang Seng Bank days were punctuated
with visits to both Hong Kong and to a China mainland that has been extensively
reshaped by modernization, marketization, and globalization reforms. Much more
Features 25
than sharing his own life story or presenting a Kwan family genealogical record of
four generations over one and a half centuries, Stanley Kwan offers an entertaining
and vivid album of faces, places, sights, sounds, happenings, comings and goings
of people, institutions, movements, and ideologies from the well-informed collective vantage of his own generation of Hong Kongers who were caught in the
whirlpool of historical forces and dynamics beyond Hong Kong.
Transcending the narrow confines of Hong Kong, considerable coverage is
devoted to the author’s own inland China sojourn during the Pacific War and his
two younger brothers’ mainland experience since late 1949. As told in chapter 2
(esp. Kwan, pp. 39–63), half a year after Hong Kong fell to the invading Japanese
forces on Christmas Day 1941 the city had to endure three years and eight months
of harsh military occupation, Stanley Kwan and a cousin made their way into
Southwest China, where Kwan served in the Chinese Nationalist army as an
interpreter for the American forces in the China theater, making good use of the
English proficiency the he had acquired as a student at King’s College, one of Hong
Kong’s top public high schools. Such frontline service for the allied war efforts
came naturally to many young Hong Kongers of his generation who readily and
easily embraced this patriotic cause without much hesitation, simply as Chinese
from Hong Kong.
However, these mainland links and once unquestioned pro-China sentiments
among many Hong Kong Chinese would take many sharp twists and turns in the
post–World War II years as the Chinese civil war intensified, leading to the Communist victory on the mainland and the Kuomintang regime’s exile to Taiwan in
1949. The more than one million mainland immigrants in Hong Kong must confront up close the drastically altered realities in mainland China. From 1949 to
1997, the colony had to coexist with a China under Communism as a neighbor,
trade partner, supplier of food and consumer goods, and above all the ancestral
homeland and place of origin for most of its populace. Spilling into Hong Kong,
the Chinese partisan strife also divided local families, including the Kwans. In the
autumn of 1949, Stanley Kwan’s younger brothers, Tse Kwong and Yuan Kwong,
chose to embark on a very different path from his by crossing the border to join
the Chinese Communist revolution on the mainland, and despite the ups and
downs of the Maoist era, both have remained to raise their own families.
A particular strength of Kwan’s memoirs is the finely textured and carefully
detailed account of the underground Chinese Communist operations in colonial
Hong Kong as seen in the cases of his two younger brothers during the late 1940s
(Kwan, pp. 72–83). The roots of the younger Kwans’ political decision to exit the
colony for the mainland started with their seemingly innocent initial enrollment
in music classes and attendance at lectures conducted by progressive bodies that
turned increasingly patriotic ( pro-Beijing). Such ostensibly cultural contacts
eventually led to their political conversion, embracing the Chinese Communist
cause that led to a five-decade mainland odyssey. The twenty-three-year-old Tse
26 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Kwong left Hong Kong in September 1949 to become a member of the team that
took over Guangzhou after its Communist liberation on October 14, 1949. The
newly arrived Yuan Kwong, age seventeen, was among the troupes that performed
songs and dances on the city street to welcome the Communist troops. Nearly a
quarter of a century later, after he had risen through the ranks at Hang Sheng
Bank, the largest local Chinese bank in Hong Kong, Stanley Kwan became a target
of the Chinese Communist Party’s united front efforts among the colony’s banking
circle as he was treated to a tour of the mainland in mid-1973 (Kwan, pp. 133–168).
By then he had attained some prominence as the creator of the now globally
known Hang Seng index (HSI, based on the trading price level of listed shares in
the Hong Kong Stock Exchange) that debuted on November 24, 1969.
Unfolded both in Hong Kong and mainland China, these real life stories of
the Kwans not only have stretched the geographical scope of this volume, but more
crucially they have injected a very keenly felt and nearly omnipresent China factor
into the Hong Kong narratives. In fact, this mainland connectedness has added a
thick layer of complexities essential to any informed and nuanced appreciation of
Hong Kongers’ individual and collective identities, politico-ideological allegiance,
and business strategies, as well as life and career decisions, especially in making
the hard choice between remaining in Hong Kong or leaving for safe havens
overseas in response to the widespread fear of uncertainty and popular crisis of
confidence as the 1997 retrocession loomed closer.
To secure his later years in an environment under the rule of law, with
­guaranteed constitutional rights and personal freedom (Kwan, p. 173), Stanley
Kwan chose to settle in Toronto, where his two daughters attended university. His
decision was undoubtedly influenced by his mainland siblings’ life under Chinese
Communism. As with many mainland-born Hong Kongers who had joined the
pre-1997 overseas exodus for similar reasons, he forsook the colony to become,
once again, an émigré escaping the fate of life under Communist rule.
As a whole, this volume has been an effective vehicle for the authors to engage
the readers through sharing a Hong Konger’s story. It is a real life presented with
sensitivity and poignancy. It is also richly embellished with insights and details to
reflect the hopes and fears as well as conflicting sentiments of many Hong Kongers
since 1949. This is a highly informative and entertaining volume that both local
and global readers would enjoy and should benefit from.
The Salaff, Wong, and Greve Volume
Organically linked to the previous volume’s account of its author’s retirement in
Toronto as an immigrant from Hong Kong, the second title under review is an
academic work comprising nine case studies of local families caught up in the
pre-1997 emigrant fever that engulfed Hong Kong. This book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Hong Kong diasporas, which includes several titles
published during the past eighteen years. In fact, some of these articles and book
Features 27
chapters were produced by the first two coauthors of this volume, the late University of Toronto sociologist Janet Salaff (1940–2010) and the recently retired University of Hong Kong sociologist Siu-lung Wong.1
To the often repeated cliché of colonial Hong Kong being a borrowed place on
borrowed time, this reviewer has always attached a further characterization of the
colony as a city with borrowed people. This is because until the 1960s, Hong Kong’s
overwhelmingly Chinese populace were mostly not locally born but rather were
mainly immigrants from mainland China, especially Guangdong province. In
addition to Hong Kong’s strategically located and superb deep-water harbor, Hong
Kong’s people have often been hailed as the key asset propelling its rise as an
international economic hub and gateway to the vast China market. In fact, its
renowned and scenic Victoria Harbor has played a crucial role, until the advent of
jet age air travel, in Hong Kong’s overseas migratory traffic. Since 1842, as a British
colony, Hong Kong has been, without much interruption and during times both
good and bad, a city of, by, and for immigrants, with many coming in, some going
out, and still others in the process of trying to get to somewhere else. Their layered
historical experiences, external links, and shifting aspirations shaped multiethnic
Hong Kong amid continuous human interflows of all descriptions. In a sense,
Hong Kong was the epicenter of Chinese overseas migration until 1949.
In a more recent context, the physical, economic, and sociocultural dimensions of Hong Kongers’ global migratory movements reached their peak in the
1980s–1990s transitional period that led to the colony’s 1997 retrocession to
­Chinese sovereignty. Since then, the still unfolding transformation of the city as
the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of a marketizing and
globalizing China has witnessed the continued momentum of migratory mobility.
The postcolonial HKSAR era is marked by a steady influx of both Chinese mainlanders as new arrivals and the homecoming of returnee émigrés, those who had
left Hong Kong earlier for overseas relocation but decided to come back for economic and sociocultural reasons, as the postcolonial political uncertainty has
largely evaporated since the 1997 handover. Of course, there are many more Hong
Kongers, who, for a host of reasons, chose to or were compelled by subjective
factors and objective conditions to remain in Hong Kong and carry on life in
business-as-usual manner, despite the 1997 sea change.
The stories of all these movers and stayers deserve a close and systematic
examination with enlightened reference to a relevant conceptual framework, the
larger realpolitik dynamics at hand, and analytical articulation of specific issues
pertaining to their going out, staying put, and coming back considerations. That
is the focus of this volume by a multinational team of three social scientists: a
Canadian, a Hong Kong Chinese, and a Norwegian. Together they contribute a
comparative volume of twelve chapters, with nine chapters, each based on a case
study, grouped in three parts: part 1, “Cosmopolitan Emigrants”; part 2, “The
Rooted: Ties to Deter Hong Kong as a Space of Flow”; and part 3, “Working Class
28 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Families: Unlikely Emigrants.” Each of these three parts includes three chapters
that represent an individual case study. Chapters 1 and 2 offer, respectively, a
discussion of institutional theory and family migration, and a delineation of Hong
Kong’s institutional background. A final chapter 12 sums up observations on these
movers and stayers.
For a relatively modest length of 229 pages of main text, this volume packs in
an amazing treasure of rich data, highly personal revelations, and retrospective
reflections on self and family across occupations, class lines, income levels, age,
and generation divides that underlined these Hong Kongers’ to-go-or-to-stay
decisions and, by extension, their strategies and orientations toward the looming
1997 regime change and the prospects of life in the HKSAR in Beijing’s shadow.
This book offers a penetrating delineation and analytical comparison of the successful and failed cases of Hong Konger’s overseas emigration in the countdown
to 1997.
Of the more than half a million Hong Kongers who chose overseas exit during
the 1984–1997 transitional era, most selected as their preferred destinations major
cities in the Western industrial democracies, with Canadian cities accommodating
more than half of them (an estimated 374,792 persons during 1984–1996, Salaff et
al., pp. 1–2). According to Canadian consular officials, nearly a third of a million
Canadian passport holders are now residing in Hong Kong. Hence, under such
circumstances, it is quite befitting that this book’s lead coauthor, Janet Salaff, is a
Canadian scholar best known for her earlier work based on extensive fieldwork in
colonial Hong Kong’s grassroots, Working Daughters of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or
Power in the Family? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). In fact,
Canada was the chosen destination for all three families that actually emigrated
from Hong Kong among the nine families that constituted the focus of this volume’s case studies. Of these nine, six families filed applications to emigrate abroad,
but only three made the relocation. Three other families, all with working-class
backgrounds, did not even lodge an application to emigrate.
In fact, these nine families were selected for this book only after a lengthy
process of nearly two decades filled with surveys and interviews that transcended
the 1997 divide, from the first survey undertaken by Salaff and her team in Hong
Kong during 1992, through other later surveys and interviews (with core family
members, kinsmen, colleagues, close friends, and those in their immediate social
circles), to a 2005 survey that finally netted these nine targeted families for the
book’s case studies. These prolonged cycles of research interface, using articulated
encounters and monitored contacts over time, yielded unique opportunities for
systematic observations of the subject families’ changing attitudes and altered
objective circumstances during the two decades straddling the pre- and post-1997
years. The data collected from and on these nine families ultimately provided the
real material for the nine substantive chapters in this highly informative and, at
times, intimately personal volume.
Features 29
This reviewer particularly enjoyed the chapters on the three transnational
Hong Kong families. As vividly highlighted in the case studies, many overseas
returnees to Hong Kong did not simply resume or reactivate the previous patterns
of their Hong Kong residence, career, and family life. Many of them returned
as different people with newly acquired layers of overseas work experience,
­professional/educational credentials, sociocultural exposure, and realigned
­domestic situations, in additional to assets and investments (very often a no-­
mortgage home in the adopted land). Hong Kong, overall, has been enhanced by
overseas migration. Far from suffering an irreplaceable brain drain, it accumulated
net gains in foreign-educated young people and global human networks.
Among those who did return to Hong Kong for career or business after
staying abroad a few years in order to obtain permanent resident legal status or a
foreign passport as a political-legal insurance policy, many do not entirely forsake
their links with their adopted overseas base/transplanted home where their
­immediate family members (wife as homemaker and children as students) have
remained. Popularly known as “astronauts,” many such transnational emigrants
who have re-anchored themselves in Hong Kong will commute long distances
several times a year for family reunions abroad.
To attain the necessary societal and demographic balance, the authors of this
volume have not ignored the stayers. Those who never left Hong Kong constitute
the great majority of the population, especially at the grassroots level, people who
hardly commanded the desired skills, foreign language proficiency, and/or economic resources for any meaningful alternative or viable exit options. Hence, with
some significant exceptions, there are some common patterns of socioeconomic
demarcations and educational/cultural gaps between the often more elite, upperor middle-class goers and the more grassroots stayers in the rather complex
mosaic of Hong Kongers’ global diasporas of the past two decades. These insightful
chapters afford refined appreciation of and sharply focused findings on the human
components of Hong Kong as a platform for global Chinese diaspora and as a
transnational hub underwriting its growth and functional viability.
Based upon solid private, personal, and family data, and buttressed by imaginative concepts with refreshing perspectives, the book’s nine case studies magnify
the organic links between the migratory mobility (or the lack of ) among Hong
Kongers and their maintenance of family coherence and kinship networks, which
are central to the migration chain processes that make some of them highly mobile
and genuinely cosmopolitan. The to-go-or-to-stay decisions and experiences of
these nine families have collectively informed and refined definitions and cate­
gories of what constitutes Hong Kongers at home and abroad beyond the rigid
jurisdictional confines and geographical parameters of Hong Kong.
As placed within a larger historical repertoire of Hong Kong’s push-and-pull
migratory effects with an almost revolving door–like function to support a human
mobility continuum, this volume modifies misconceptions of the sociodemographic,
30 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
legal-administrative, and transnational migratory dimensions that shaped Hong
Kongers. These chapters reveal the recent Hong Kong developmental experience as
a continuous conveyer belt with an impressive absorbent capacity and efficient
revolving-door mechanisms to facilitate the comings and goings of people who
entered, exited, and reentered the territory over the past two decades. All these
testify to Hong Kong’s strategic functions as the launching/relaunching platform,
retrieval station, proving grounds, sanctuary, and bridging link for its residents. A
city of migrants with a historical role as the preeminent overseas Chinese disembarkation and remittance center, Hong Kong has been the core of a transnational
Chinese world. Hong Kong has gained tremendously from the continuous circulation of people who bring skills, ideas, heritages, capital, and networks to support a
multitiered matrix of transnational dynamics. In illuminating a vital human
dimension of Hong Kong’s global outreach and external sociocultural linkages
through the study of Hong Kongers, both as overseas emigrants and as deeply
rooted locals with their vastly different expectations and complex articulation of
risk, opportunity costs, and potential yields underlining a carefully constructed
spectrum of relocation decisions, this book is a splendid contribution.
The Lee Volume
The third and last volume under review here is not a typical academic study per se
but rather a refined collage of eight masterful essays. Each chapter in this book
focuses on selected facets of Hong Kong’s history and culture manifested in places,
people, and styles. These facets are viewed from the author’s skillful combination
of three perspectives — that of the native, the long-term expatriate, and the insider,
with the insider vantage his adopted main approach.
The author, Leo Lee, a leading scholar of modern Chinese literature, culture,
and intellectual history, is also a well-known columnist and prolific critic of literary
works, films, theater, opera, and music with frequent contributions to Hong Kong–
based Chinese-language newspapers as well as weekly and monthly magazines such
as Ming Pao, Hong Kong Economic Journal, and Asia Week. He previously taught at
Princeton, Indiana, Chicago, and UCLA before returning to his alma mater, Harvard
(PhD 1970), where he retired as a professor of Chinese literature and civilization in
2004. At present Lee is a professor of humanities at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong, where he started his university teaching career in 1970–1972. He has
also held visiting appointments at the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology and the University of Hong Kong. Thus, he possesses considerable
firsthand experience with all three major research univer­sities in Hong Kong.
Married to a Hong Kong woman, to whom this book is dedicated (“To my
wife Esther, who to me embodies the best of Hong Kong”), Lee has been a local
resident since 2004. His thick, varied, and impressive Hong Kong résumé, spanning
four decades, renders him an ideal teller/interpreter of a refreshingly different,
culturally sensitive, and historically minded version of the story of Hong Kong:
Features 31
“my city,” as clearly labeled in the book’s subtitle. Honed by his trans-Pacific sojourn
and Greater China linkages (he was born on the China mainland but grew up and was
educated, through his undergraduate career, in Taiwan, where some of his Chinese
volumes and many of his Chinese articles were published), this book aims at both the
local Hong Kong and a global readership, especially those interested in East-West
sociocultural fusion and comparative cultural urbanism, colonial and otherwise.
In a sense, this book on his adopted hometown, Hong Kong, can be regarded
as a continuation of Lee’s earlier and much acclaimed cultural study of a Chinese
city endowed with an international flair, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New
Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999). Somewhat linked to the second title under review here, Lee’s book also
addresses Hong Kongers’ external links and cosmopolitan orientations that were
sharpened by the 1997 China factor with implications for their diasporas. In his
lengthy prologue, Lee explains that “it is the lived culture of these permanents of
Hong Kong is part of what inspired me to write this book” (Lee, p. 4) and that this
volume “offers my tentative report on Hong Kong’s ‘postcondition’ ” (Lee, p. 5).
Furthermore, he also intended this volume to be a sequel to Hong Kong native and
University of Hong Kong academic Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the
Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997).
Coming to life under Leo Lee’s seasoned pen, this volume offers a fascinating
intellectual potpourri of a travelogue, revisionist history, cultural deconstruction,
and personal reflections. Filled with insights, sensitivity, and warm sympathies, he
tries to resurrect a sociocultural Hong Kong that few outsiders can ever accurately
pinpoint yet many insiders can keenly feel beneath the surface but cannot so easily
articulate. By design, the first six chapters of this book are constructed around
walking tours of areas of the city to evoke sentiments and images of key moments
and vital components in Hong Kong’s history and culture.
Chapter 1 starts this literary reconnaissance with Victoria City on Hong Kong
Island, where the British colonialists first settled in 1841–1842. Chapter 2 focuses
on the central district, the government administrative headquarters and financial
and professional hub with its overtly probusiness and proestablishment milieu.
Chapter 3 moves to the adjacent Wan Chai of “Suzie Wong” fame (the 1960 Hollywood film starring William Holden and local Eurasian girl Nancy Kwan, who
was born to a Hong Kong Chinese architect father and an English mother). Then in
chapter 4, the author ascends the hill to Victoria Peak, the highest point on the
island and once the white elites’ exclusive Caucasians-only residential preserve
with no Chinese allowed except for domestic servants and service laborers. Crossing the Victoria Harbor, chapter 5 tours the Kowloon peninsula and is followed by
chapter 6’s excursion into an area running north to the mainland China border,
namely the New Territories, which remain more rural and is infused with stronger
Chinese folk traditions. (The expiration of its ninety-nine-year lease in mid-1997
triggered the 1997 syndrome.) In his accounts of these localities, sights, sounds,
32 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
artifacts, and moments, Lee accords due acknowledgments to the non-Chinese
native or non-Cantonese local elements in the city’s historical evolution and
cultural heritage, key components that have made Hong Kong unique and distinctive from other Chinese cities.
The last two chapters are more topical and issue-oriented. Chapter 7, on the
Hong Kong lifestyle, and chapter 8, on the complex and evolving mainland–Hong
Kong relations that are at times strained and stressful at the popular level, stem
largely from Lee’s “personal experience as a witness to the great changes that
occurred during the decade after the handover” (Lee, p. 6). Here, the author seems
to be at his best by affording his Hong Kong story an indigenous perspective fortified by the uncovering of some deep communal roots that are seldom noticed by
outsiders. In these final pages, the author liberally shares his anxieties, anguish,
fears, and hopes for Hong Kong’s postcolonial era realignment of sociocultural iden‑
tities, values orientation, politico-ideological conformity, creativity, and vibrancy
as both a Chinese and a world city where nothing can be taken for granted.
At the heart of his volume, the author does not provide easy answers to a host
of crucial questions, ranging from “How does a city like Hong Kong define itself
with all its contradictions and uniqueness?” to more speculative future prospecting. For the first two postwar generations of Hong Kongers, too much water has
flowed under the bridge in terms of its drastic transformation from a colonial
outpost to world hub in finance, shipping, and trade to become a thriving and
globally connected capitalist HKSAR under the world’s largest Communist state
with its glaring deficits on freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. When
confronting the undercurrents for change and the powerful dark forces from all
directions beyond Hong Kong’s shores that are at play in reshaping the city, its
cultural dynamics, and the fate of its more than seven million residents, Lee is far
from certain what the next chapters of his Hong Kong story will be like. Given the
rapid pace and extensive scope of mainland China’s ongoing changes in its hardware and software realms, few can forecast with confidence and certainty what
China’s Hong Kong will be like by the mid-twenty-first century. After all, notwithstanding the city’s East-West sociocultural uniqueness and global networks, the
Hong Kong story is, in reality, only an exciting part of a much larger China story
that is far too complicated for an easy description, let alone intelligent deciphering.
After using the nostalgia craze prompted by the 1997 handover to provoke a
deeper reckoning of the city’s character and attributes, Lee’s observation on the
1997 fear of Communist China syndrome is still highly relevant today and could
mean a problematic passage to 2047, the preordained end of the One-Country,
Two-Systems’ model that mandates Hong Kong’s eventual merger-convergence
with the mainland Chinese polity, economy, society, and culture: “Hong Kong’s
past has required a double denial: Hong Kong is my home, and neither England
nor China is my country. The underlying anguish and anxiety caused by this
diasporic mentality under colonialism has seldom been fully understood, much
Features 33
less appreciated, by outsiders.” Those outsiders naturally include many Chinese
mainlanders.
Combining cogent intellectual analysis, sharp but well-justified criticism, and
a deep sense of caring commitment throughout its pages as illuminated with
delightful photos, Hong Kong’s insiders and outsiders alike should warmly
embrace Lee’s Hong Kong story as told in this volume. It offers much to advance
significantly our in-depth appreciation of the elusive Hong Kong hearts, minds,
and souls from the past, in the present, and even with a glimpse of the future.
In our quest for knowledge about Hong Kong, all three titles under review
here are well worth reading. Each book, in its own way, is a very good indicator of
the maturing level of international research scholarship and personal recollection/
reflection on Hong Kong.
Ming K. Chan
Ming K. Chan is a visiting fellow at the Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford
University, where he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1976–1980/
1999–2009 and ran its Hong Kong Documentary Archives. The author or editor of
fourteen academic volumes and more than eighty articles and books chapters on
Chinese history, Sino-international links, and Hong Kong/Macao/Guangdong, Ming
Chan’s most recent books on Hong Kong are Historical Dictionary of the Hong Kong
SAR and the Macao SAR (2006), China’s Hong Kong Transformed (2008),
Perspectives on Lingnan Modern History: Guangdong and Its Hong Kong Links
(2010), and The Luso-Macau Connections is Sun Yatsen’s Modern Chinese
Revolution (2011).
Note
1. Academic studies on Hong Kong migration and settlement overseas include:
Huhua Cao and Vivienne Poy, eds., The China Challenge: Sino–Canadian Relations in the
21st Century (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011); especially see chapter 6 by Ming K. Chan,
“Friends across the Pacific: Links between Canada and Hong Kong in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” pp. 81–99; also its third part, “The Chinese Diaspora and Immigration in
Canada,” pp. 158–267.
Ming K. Chan, “Sino-U.S. Links with a Twist: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on
American Relations with China’s Hong Kong and Macao,” in Macao in US-China Relations, ed.
Yufan Hao and Jianwei Wang (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).
Ming K. Chan’s review in Pacific Affairs 83, no. 3 (fall 2010).
Khun Eng Kuah, “Negotiating Emigration and the Family: Individual Solutions to the 1997
Anxiety,” in Max J. Skidmore, ed., The Future of Hong Kong, The Annals of the American Academy
of Political & Social Science, (Los Angeles: Sage, September 1996); also in Max J. Skidmore, ed.,
Hong Kong and China: Pursuing a New Destiny (Singapore: Toppan, 1997).
Elizabeth Sinn, ed., The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 1997).
Helen F. Siu and Agnes S. Ku, eds., Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008).
34 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Ronald Skeldon, ed., Reluctant Exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas
Chinese (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). [The fifth title in the M. E. Sharpe twelve-volume
series Hong Kong Becoming China: The Transition to 1997, edited by Ming K. Chan and Gerrard
A. Postiglone, with Asia paperback edition issued by Hong Kong University Press.]
Ronald Skeldon, Emigration from Hong Kong: Tendencies and Impacts (Hong Kong: Chinese
University Press, 1995).
Nan Sussman, Return Migration and Identity: A Global Phenomenon, a Hong Kong Case
(Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2011).
Academic works on Hong Kong migration produced by Janet Salaff and Siu-lun Wong that
were published before this present volume under review here include:
Janet W. Salaff, Siu-lun Wong, and Mei-ling Fong, “Hong Kong Families’ Views of 1997,” in
The Challenge of Hong Kong’s Reintegration with China, ed. Ming K. Chan (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 1997).
Janet W. Salaff and Siu-lun Wong, “Globalizing of Hong Kong’s People: International Migra‑
tion and the Family,” in Hong Kong’s Reunion with China, ed. Gerald A. Postiglione and James
T. H. Tang (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997) [The seventh title in the M. E. Sharpe twelve-­
volume series Hong Kong Becoming China: The Transition to 1997, edited by Ming K. Chan and
Gerrard A. Postiglone, with Asia paperback edition issued by Hong Kong University Press.]
Janet W. Salaff, Eric Fong, and Siu-lun Wong, “Using Social Networks to Exit Hong Kong,”
in Network in the Global Village: Life in Contemporary Communities, ed. Barry Wellman (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1999).
Janet W. Salaff, “Like Sons and Daughters of Hong Kong: The Return of the Young Generation,” in Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population, ed. Helen F. Siu and Agnes S. Ku (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008).
Siu-lun Wong and Janet W. Salaff, “Network Capital: Emigration from Hong Kong,” British
Journal of Sociology 49, no. 3 (1998): 258–274.
History, Identity, and the State in East Asia
Gotelind Müller. Designing History in East Asian Textbooks: Identity Politics
and Transnational Aspirations. Routledge Studies in Education and Society
in Asia. London: Routledge, 2011. xiv, 290 pp. Notes, index. Hardcover
$148.00, isbn 978-0-415-60252-5.
© 2013 by University
James Reilly. Strong Society, Smart State: The Rise of Public Opinion in
of Hawai‘i Press
China’s Japan Policy. Contemporary Asia in the World. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012. xv, 352 pp. Notes, bibliography, index.
Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0-231-15806-0.
Features 35
These two recent books on East Asia, while not closely related at first glance, are
both testimony to the persistent power of history in group identity, how citizens
view their state, and states’ international relations. Historical memory is a potent
force in public opinion that can be manipulated for political ends — but, despite
the discrediting of the primordialist approach to identity in postmodern theory
and the current popularity of constructivism, the sense of connection to traumatic
events experienced in the past by the group one identifies with is not purely
constructed, and persists, even if sometimes as a latent force, among members of
political groups. A difficult history between groups can never be completely erased
or tamed. As the political scientist Lily Gardner Feldman has demonstrated in her
studies of Germany’s post–World War II relations with its neighbors and the
descendants of victim groups, difficult histories must be consciously managed and
never taken for granted.1 This is essentially what is called long-term reconciliation.
The two very interesting studies under review here, the first a collection of articles
mainly by historians whose work includes a focus on history education and historiography in Asia, and the other by a political scientist, are further linked by a
recognition of the importance of education as a crucial political institution — as
opposed to just a social service traditionally provided by the state in the modern
period — both in domestic as well as international relations.
Gotelind Müller’s edited volume Designing History in East Asian Textbooks:
Identity Politics and Transnational Aspirations is, of course, a more overt study of
the politics of historical memory and education. While it has some weaknesses, the
volume is valuable for those who follow this topic, which has grown in interest
over the last decade or so, parallel to the emerging fields of transitional justice and
conflict management. The volume’s cohesiveness transcends its origins as a set of
papers prepared for a conference, usually a guarantee for a rather random collection. The greatest weaknesses are the fact that, while it claims to be about East
Asian textbooks, the real focus is on China (the Sinitic world, including Hong
Kong and Taiwan) and Japan and their relations. South Korea is represented by
one essay by the only Korean author. This understudied country is very interesting
in its own right for issues of group identity and relations with its neighbors, and it
has tensions, contrary to popular belief, not only with Japan — which is almost
certainly unlikely to be an existential threat to Korea for the conceivable future,
whatever disagreements arise over islands between the two countries — but also
with China, the enormous regional power and closer neighbor fast rising to be a
world power. In addition, the problem of history is also a potent force between
North and South Korea, and this problematic is not discussed in the volume.2
More attention to Korea would have enriched the book. The book is also poorly
edited, especially considering that many of the authors are not native English
speakers; at best, many nonnative constructions and word usages undermine the
substantive contributions of many of the articles and, at worst, make them confusing in places.
36 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
However, these two weaknesses do not detract significantly from the volume’s
main contributions. The first is to take this topic beyond the cul-de-sac in which
it too often seems to get trapped, into pertinent education disciplines beyond
history, thus situating history education within education (schooling) as a larger
system rather than leaving it marooned as its own topic, which it too often is by
specialists in conflict resolution, justice, and/or politics who do not think about
education as a complex institution. The second major contribution is to take the
possibility of history education reform as a part of political reconciliation beyond
bilateral visions of conflict (China-Japan, China-Korea, Poland-Germany, etc.) and
into a multilateral, regional, or international context, where the challenges become:
How do groups portray themselves and others — especially those who by virtue of
history are “Others,” and thus have special salience for how the groups see themselves? How do we teach history for a less state-centric and more regionalized,
more globalized world? How do we broaden our mental boundaries while retaining local identity in a way that is less conflictive? The focus in this volume on
history as part of the problem of self and other(s) in political identity, as opposed
to yet another repetition of the difficult historical topics for teaching Sino-Japanese
and Japanese-Korean historical relations — “comfort women”, Nanjing, apologies,
visits to Yasakuni Shrine, colonialism — is a real and refreshing contribution to the
literature.
The volume opens with Sun Ge’s examination of the lack of a strong East
Asian regional consciousness. This is important, given that the unstated background to the discussion in the book is the more advanced level of post–World
War II history textbook collaboration and political reconciliation in Europe,
achieved precisely together with the rise of Europe as a region — although Falk
Pingel, in the last chapter, reminds us that discussions about history textbooks
across national lines in Europe predated the rise of an integrated Europe and were
first seen as a tool for “taming nationalism” (Müller, p. 271). East Asia, as Sun
reminds us, means something different to those who live in the region than Europe
does to Europeans, and, in fact, not only the meaning but even the boundaries of
East Asia are far more ambiguous. In addition, the concept itself has come from
the outside (the United States) or has migrated from some intellectuals in some
states (Korea and Japan, in consideration of their bilateral history) to others
(China). A key problem for the sense of regional belonging, and hence of a
­possible framework to facilitate reconciliation, is directly linked to the difficult
history that impedes reconciliation: Japan’s claim to the original modernization in
the region and the implied comparison with Korea and China, and its historic use
of the concept of an East Asian region inherent in its imperialist co-prosperity
sphere, part of its colonial domination and invasion of other states in the region.
This is an essential impediment to the possibility that local state identities could
easily evolve beyond nationalistic and defensive stances, and hence also an impediment to robust reconciliation, in which conflicting views of history remain at
Features 37
manageable levels. It is essentially a vicious circle from which escape is particularly
difficult. In addition, the essential problem for how history is portrayed, including
in history books, is that a balance must be struck between the very different
experiences of different states (in the history under discussion, the we-all-suffered
approach is mendacious) and the need to go beyond being trapped in the perspective of one’s own nation state, which limits the formation of new identities and
deepens reconciliation. Sun Ge is also quite right that the usual definition of “East
Asia” leaves out other very important actors in the region’s modern history, including Vietnam and the United States (the latter particularly during the Cold War).
From a study of the problems of historical consciousness in the region, the
collection moves to specific states: Müller’s chapter on teaching the history of the
self and others in China, Klaus Vollmer’s on Japan, Edward Vickers on Hong Kong,
and Lung-Chih Chang’s on Taiwan. Müller’s article is a very useful review of the
pedagogy of teaching history and how it has changed in modern China from the
late Qing forward, with a focus not on how that history has treated China and the
Chinese — which would be the usual approach to a study of the politics of history
education — but how history education has treated China and others, particularly
Europeans and near neighbors. One omission in this otherwise innovative study is
that of the patriotic education, with its focus on grievance epitomized by the guo
chi, or the national humiliation theme, promulgated after the crackdown on the
Tiananmen protest movement on June 4, 1989. Reference to the work of two
strong writers on the topic of nationalism in Chinese education, William Callahan
and Wang Zheng, are missing from this chapter. (They are both cited by Reilly,
however, although he is not directly discussing education.)
Vollmer’s article is a very good analysis of how civics textbooks are connected
to history and geography materials, and a convincing argument that, in order to
understand the politics of education about identity, the focus should be broadened
from its current over-emphasis on history. He notes that civics materials also
present a narrative of the self and others, but since civics education relies less on
historical events, it is able to avoid images of self and other that are as starkly
antagonistic or based on victimization as history education can be. Vickers takes
up the fascinating topic of history education in Hong Kong that he has presented
elsewhere3 in a chapter discussing the tensions between local Hong Kong educational practice and historical identity and the desires of Hong Kong’s rulers, the
government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), since the 1997 retrocession,
to increase the identification of Hong Kong’s citizens with the mainland. This focus
on the identity dimension of the struggle between the Chinese periphery and
metropole is hardly a minor issue for a major power with separatist movements
on several borders and unresolved relations with Taiwan, which so far is managing
to walk the tightrope of de facto political independence while leaving ambiguous
its relation to the mainland in the interest of avoiding armed conflict. A recent
academic study found Hong Kongers maintaining a robust local identity together
38 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
with a sense of identification with China as a culture or civilization — but also with
widespread resentment of mainlanders and a very weak identification with the
PRC as a political unit. This has caused concern in Beijing and a campaign to
increase identification with the PRC. It can be assumed that the schools, the
curriculum, and textbooks will be affected by this campaign.4
Chang’s chapter is a very useful study of the development of Taiwan’s history
curriculum and materials from the patriotic and state-centric toward the “cultivation of ‘historical consciousness and core competence’ ”; from “ ‘centrism’ to
‘multiculturalism’ that emphasizes autonomy, respect for difference and understanding universal values such as human rights and environmental consciousness”
(Müller, p. 126); and with decreased emphasis on political-military events and
more on social and cultural developments (Müller, p. 128). This is a striking
­example of the globalizing tendency in history education, better attested to so far
in Europe and North America than in Asia, “toward ‘social-sciencization’ (an
increasing focus on contemporary history and on society as opposed to the state)
and a steady globalization.”5 It is a trend that gives some hope that globalization
may be in the process of providing a path away from nationalism.
In the section on practical issues in history textbook writing, Li Fan discusses
the challenges of reforming the Chinese history curriculum. Perhaps because the
political sensitivity of some aspects of his topic, perhaps due to editing, some of
the chapter is confusing: What is the gap between “reality and social development”? What is “content integration” as opposed to “topicality”? (Müller, p. 140).
I was never clear on what “emotional and value-based education” means. (It would
have been helpful for speakers of Chinese at least to be able to see the characters of
this phrase in Chinese, and a more thorough explanation would have been even
more helpful.) It is interesting that Li Fan raises the dilemma for educators of
whether to have as a goal of education the promotion of patriotism or of cosmopolitanism, as this is also a dilemma for educators in states that are thought to be
far less nationalistic, and more multicultural, than China.6 Li’s article is particularly interesting for the surprisingly critical, even daring, comments about the
content of some Chinese textbooks, for example, from Zhu’s history textbook, “In
the late Qing. . . . the highly centralized autocratic dynasty finally trended toward
the end. However, the traditional historical intertia continued to affect the political
life of modern times” ( p. 144) and “Understanding the construction of democracy
in Greece and the legal system in Rome. . . . is helpful for China’s building a
democracy and a legal system” ( p. 145). Su Zhiliang’s chapter moves into the heart
of the challenge of a difficult history when he discusses how Chinese history
textbooks, some of which he has written, portray Sino-Japanese relations, and
how these portrayals have changed, with a (surprisingly) recent reduction of the
portrayal of Japanese World War II atrocities. This important essay shows, albeit
indirectly, some of the political resistance liberal, cosmopolitan historians and
history educators (and not only in China) face in trying to change the face of
Features 39
history education, making it a more thoughtful critique of some aspects of one’s
own history as well as a history of others that tries to go beyond the negative and
antagonistic focus. Miyake Akimasa’s chapter is an account of the changing portrayal of Japan’s behavior toward its neighbors in World War II. While Miyake’s
own efforts to “stress the opening up [of history textbooks] to the world outside
Japan” (Müller, p. 178) is admirable, his treatment of the fate of certain popular
topics — notably the “comfort women”, the Japanese army’s atrocities in China,
Japan’s record of apologies, and the Japanese army’s role in mass civilian suicides in
Okinawa at the war’s end — is surprisingly vague. Many of these topics are left out
or only hinted at, or presented very coyly: for example, what he calls a “toning
down” of accounts of Japanese “assaults and aggression” (Müller, p. 174) is actually,
according to Steffi Richter in her chapter, the complete removal in 2005 from the
history textbooks of any mention of the “comfort women”.
The final section of the volume addresses issues of political reconciliation
more directly. First, it sets the topic of history textbooks in a broader context of
difficult historical issues (Richter’s chapter on the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, an
event that was for too long overshadowed by studies of the Nuremburg Tribunal
and its effect on Germany’s relations with former victims and/or their descendants,
and Chung Jae-Jeong’s on Korea-Japan relations). It also compares other interstate
historical dialogues, notably the German-Polish, with inter-Asian dialogues and
bilateral institutions created for history dialogue (Kawate Keiichi’s chapter).
Finally, Falk Pingel’s insightful final chapter summarizes the achievements and
limits of earlier dialogues and frameworks and proposes new ways to think
about the dilemma of teaching about histories whose difficulties — René Le Sage’s
“stubborn facts” — will not go away, while the need for reconciliation continues to
press educators for new ways of thinking. Pingel brings new ideas to the broader
problem of reconciliation when he proposes “science as a mediator” (Müller,
p. 258), with intergroup commissions, domestic and international, providing new
space for new professional affinity groups. (While these history textbook reform
and dialogue groups have not had many successes around the world in producing
textbooks that became widely used, the ability of historians and educators from
opposing national and ethno-religious groups to work together and even form
very positive professional attachments is well documented in a number of cases.7)
Based on his extensive experience as an education reformer in post-conflict contexts and analyst of history textbooks, Pingel makes a number of concrete suggestions for improving cross-border dialogues on how to teach difficult history. The
first is that the dialogue groups must work together for sustained periods to affect
real change. Another is that the state cannot be excluded from the business of
legitimizing history textbooks, as Chang suggests it should be in his chapter. A
third is that teacher training should be a central activity of such efforts, not just
textbook reform. A fourth suggestion is that the creation of networks of history
educators and NGOs are critical to supporting these difficult long-term struggles
40 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
for reform. And finally he proposed that textbook research urgently needs to go
beyond issues of atrocities and implied accusations and take up broader issues
of pedagogy and treatment of “others” in general, not just historical enemies.
History textbook dialogues should encourage critical self-questioning from all
participants, not just from the other. This chapter is a strong finish to a collection
that brings fresh ideas and a very international set of viewpoints to bear on a
difficult topic in long-term peace building.
James Reilly’s study of the role of public opinion in autocratic China takes as
its focus a case study that is fraught with history: China’s Japan policy from 1980
to 2010 (actually, the end of 2009). Reilly’s well-researched and well-written 2012
book on foreign policy and nationalism is very interesting. However, his larger
aim, which is to prove that, contrary to popular belief, the Chinese government is
thoroughly in control of its policy making and is able to control, manipulate, and
work around popular opinion when it goes counter to what the government judges
to be in the national interest, may be less successful. Unfortunately, Reilly’s book,
clearly written by a gifted scholar with very deep political, social, and linguistic
knowledge of his state of focus, has suffered from the inescapable problem of the
gap between the time needed to complete research and to get a book published — and the march of history itself. Reilly’s references to the Middle Eastern
states as examples of successful autocracy (“The tolerance, responsiveness, and
persuasiveness of the Communist Party in China in facing popular pressure is
echoed by many stable, nondemocratic regimes in the Middle East, Africa, Central
Asia and elsewhere”; Reilly, p. 2) were made before the Arab uprisings of 2011 and
demonstrations in Russia around rigged elections. More recently, Bo Xilai’s fall
from grace and the Chen Guangcheng affair — which the Chinese state’s Internet
censors have been unable to keep out of the Chinese version of Twitter — show that
the state in China and its pact with its citizens may not be so unshakeable as some
may have thought, although the larger implications of these two quite astonishing
events, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was unable to hide from the
eyes of the world, may not be evident for quite a while.
China-focused scholars and policy makers will wonder two things when
reading Reilly’s book. First, why does he choose to base his claims for China’s
stability based on foreign policy, less relevant for citizens than issues that affect
their daily lives and neighborhoods? Reilly argues that Chinese policy makers are
responsive enough to ensure that anti-Japanese demonstrations cannot seriously
challenge China’s Japan policy over the long term, but he barely mentions the
many protests and other forms of unrest in response to China’s domestic policies.
Protests across the country, by many accounts, number into the thousands each
year and are inspired by serious internal problems ranging from corruption to
illegal land seizures to deaths and injuries related to pollution and shoddy, dangerous, and improperly regulated goods. Interethnic clashes and protests related to
ethnic policies are another form of instability. While the regime itself does not
Features 41
seem to be in imminent danger, the number of these events has not fallen over the
years — and the overwhelming trend of this decade seems to be away from official
tolerance for both social activism and legal challenges to the state’s power over its
aggrieved citizens.
The second question is why Reilly overlooks — or at least does not refer
to — the role of sheer brutality in China’s dealings with these many incidents of
protest against domestic policies. The lawyer Ni Yulan, who can no longer walk
because her kneecaps and feet were broken in prison as a result of her defense of
Bejing citizens facing forced eviction from their homes, would probably not find
the Chinese state’s methods of dealing with dissent “tolerant, responsive or persuasive.”8 Reilly sees the resilience of the Chinese regime as resting on a policy of
“contained contention,” enforced by “pervasive surveillance, coercion, and censorship” (Reilly, p. 1), but these words do not convey the violence which the authorities can and do turn to in order to maintain their rule. The level of surveillance,
coercion, censorship and violence together, generally rising since the early 1990s,
undermines Reilly’s claim that, based on his study of foreign policy, the regime has
“developed a system of responsive authoritarianism,” which allows for state-society
relations he sees as cyclical: waves of popular mobilization are met with a range of
state responses that successfully address the grievances in a limited fashion, while
successfully containing and defusing them. “Rather than seeing such interactions
as having a necessary endpoint — signaling either the collapse of CCP rule amid
popular pressure or the final victory of China’s propaganda state over the
­Internet — these dynamics reveal the fundamentally cyclical nature of state-society
relations in China today” (Reilly, p. 53). In his book, he has demonstrated, albeit
masterfully, the presence of these cycles for foreign, not domestic, policy.
However, despite these questions about Reilly’s basic claims, this is a valuable
study. Even if Reilly’s claims would need to take into account domestic policy to
have credibility, the regime flexibility and nuances he demonstrates vis-à-vis
China’s policy toward Japan is fascinating. Common wisdom, which Reilly criticizes for too often seeing either immanent revolution or the regime’s total control
of the Internet, certainly sees China’s Japan policy as monolithically negative, and
China-Japan relations as eternally vexed, but Reilly demonstrates that this is not
the case. Perhaps most interesting is his evidence that many members of the
government, policy makers and intellectuals who advise the government (although
not the new leftists, whose star, in any case, may now be fading since Bo Xilai has
fallen), and even members of the public agree that good relations with Japan are
important and history should not be allowed to highjack other national interests.
As Reilly states, “It seems that by 2008 the Chinese public was increasingly aware
that China’s own actions, including military buildups and anti-Japan activism,
could have destructive implications for bilateral relations and damage China’s own
national interests” (Reilly, p. 200). Among these national interests are establishing
the reputation of the Chinese people for being politically mature and reasonable
42 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
enough to be able to separate contemporary Japan from the earlier militaristic
regime, and keeping public emotions around the history issues in check.
Using media sources, including television coverage, Reilly painstakingly
charts the changes in China’s Japan policy and in public opinion toward Japan,
particularly with regard to the timing of waves of popular anti-Japanese mobilization. He does, indeed, prove that, on the issue of Japan, the Chinese government
seems able thus far to ride the tiger of popular sentiment, reining it in when
necessary and unleashing it when expedient for purposes of negotiation. The
study is very useful for its analysis of the various types of media in China, particularly the commercial and Party newspapers, whose differing coverage of Japan
and historical issues may well be coordinated, with negative coverage from the
former tolerated at certain times and for certain ends — but within well-defined
limits. Reilly also makes good use of public opinion polls to analyze changing
public attitudes toward Japan. He demonstrates “a clear trend of improved attitudes toward Japan since 2006” (Reilly, p. 196). This, again, goes against the general feeling among international relations experts who are not specialists in
Sino-­Japanese relations that Chinese hatred for the Japanese is steady and
unabated.
However, historical grievance-based nationalism in China is not limited to
Japan’s treatment of China. The South China Sea is the latest space in which
tensions between China and her neighbors (implying China’s relations with the
United States as well) have risen to dangerous heights. As a recent International
Crisis Group (ICG) report, Stirring up the South China Sea, shows, Chinese
nationalism, drawing directly on the potent century of humiliation and rejuve­
nation of China rhetoric, and its manipulation by various actors inside China,
continues to play a pernicious role both inside and outside China: “After being
unleashed, this sentiment has sometimes become extreme enough to damage
Beijing’s interests and even call into question its domestic legitimacy.”9 ICG’s
analysts generally agree with Reilly, noting that “As long as the central leadership
adopts a clear policy and decides to rein in dissent, however, it can play a role in
temporarily limiting nationalist sentiments . . . although this ability is declining
with the rapid growth of new media . . . while nationalism can serve as a constraint
when leaders have no clear policy on major issues, once Beijing makes a decision,
it can take measures to tame nationalist sentiments if the issue has not captured
high-profile international attention.”10
However, the real challenge for China’s peaceful rise is to moderate nationalism and foster a new identity for Chinese vis-à-vis the world in which China is
increasingly engaged — not to find ways to maintain the “delicate balance” (Reilly,
p. 228) of permitting or even encouraging nationalist sentiments from the public
and then temporarily reining them in. Of all public sentiments, aggrieved nationalism is perhaps the most dangerous force. It is a weapon that can be aimed in
multiple directions, and while the state may try to keep Chinese ultranationalism
Features 43
from rising to dangerously high levels by policing the Internet, manipulating the
media, and controlling civil society groups who go too far toward the recuperation
of popular memory by demanding redress, the force is protean and may be impossible to thwart entirely. In the end, Reilly’s study demonstrates why new directions
in history and related subjects, such as civic education, are so important if education is to transform the roles self and other play in identity. It also demonstrates,
however, why such reforms in politically crucial areas such as education are likely
to meet strong headwinds in China, where the Party continues to maneuver very
carefully between providing citizens the occasional opportunity to vent, in order to
lower the likelihood of widespread resistance, while preventing the development of
spaces for truly free dialogue on controversial issues. Reilly asserts that the patriotic education campaign peaked in 1995 and, according to surveys, “actually failed
to stimulate strong emotions among Chinese youth” (Reilly, p. 125). If this is true,
it is a good sign, both for nationalism inside China and for the future of inter­
national relations in East and Southeast Asia. However, Wang Zheng, who focuses
on nationalism in China, contends that nationalism based on the concept of past
humiliation continues to be a dominant force, now institutionalized, in Chinese
society.11 Wang Zheng focuses on history education, including not only textbook
contents but also the use of public institutions such as museums, memorials, and
rituals. The stakes, as Reilly illuminates them, for both regional relations and
China’s domestic stability are very high. They demonstrate how important history
education, its pedagogy and philosophy, is in shaping the way people define
themselves and others, their neighbors included. The international dialogue on
how to teach history and related subjects that takes place within Mueller’s collection is critical, and for no country’s future more than for China’s.
Elizabeth A. Cole
Elizabeth A. Cole is a senior program officer at the United States Institute of Peace
(USIP) specializing in transitional justice, history education, history and memory,
and education and conflict. The views expressed are her own and do not represent
USIP, which does not take policy positions.
Notes
1. See, for example, Lily Gardner Feldman, “A Three-Dimensional View of German History:
The Weight of the Past in Germany’s Relations with Jews in Germany, Israel and the Diaspora,” in
Germany at Fifty-Five, ed. James Sperling (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); and
“The Principle and Practice of ‘Reconciliation’ in German Foreign Policy: Relations with France,
Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic,” International Affairs 75, no. 2 (1999): 333–356.
2. For two works that look at the place of history and education in North Korean–South
Korean relations, see Roland Bleiker and Hoang Young-ju, “On the Use and Abuse of Korea’s
Past: An Inquiry into History Teaching and Reconciliation,” in Teaching the Violent Past: History
Education and Reconciliation, ed. Elizabeth A. Cole (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007),
pp. 249–274; and Dennis Hart, “Creating the National Other: Opposing Images of Nationalism in
South and North Korean Education,” Korean Studies 23 (1999): 67–69.
44 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
3. See, for example, Flora Kan and Edward Vickers, “One Hong Kong, Two Histories:
‘History’ and ‘Chinese History’ in the Hong Kong School Curriculum,” Comparative Education
38, no. 1 (2002): 73–89.
4. See Andrew Higgins, “China Denounces ‘Hong Konger’ Trend,” Washington Post,
January 11, 2012, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinadenounces-hong-konger-trend/2012/01/10/gIQAmivNqP_story.html.
5. Jacques E. C. Hymans, “What Counts as History and How Much Does History Count?
The Case of French Secondary Education,” in The Nation, Europe and the World: Textbooks and
Curricula in Transition, ed. Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2005), p. 61, citing David John Frank et al., “What Counts as History: A Cross-National
and Longitudinal Study of University Curricula,” in Comparative Education Review 44 (2000):
29–53.
6. See, for example, Robert Fullinwider, “Patriotic History,” in Public Education in a
Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, Critique, ed. R. Fullinwider (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
7. For a study of the promise and limits of professional affinities in international conflict
resolution, see, for example, William J. Long’s recent book on the public health profession,
Pandemics and Peace: Public Health Cooperation in Zones of Conflict (Washington, DC: United
States Institute of Peace Press, 2011).
8. Amnesty International, “Christmas Crackdown against Chinese Activists Continues,”
Press Release, December 28, 2011, available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/pressreleases/china-christmas-crackdown-against-activists-continues-2011-12-28.
9. International Crisis Group, Stirring up the South China Sea (1), Asia Report no. 223,
April 23, 2012, p. 26.
10. Ibid., pp. 27–28.
11. Wang Zheng, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics
and Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), and personal communications with author.
Reviews
Alexander Beecroft. Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and
China: Patterns of Literary Circulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010. ix, 328 pp. Hardcover $85.00, isbn 978-0-521-19431-0.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
This book is a rare foray into comparative literature in its boldest form, an examination of two mutually isolated literatures. Though for most scholars the challenges
of approaching simultaneously two cultures so far removed as ancient Greece and
China seem insurmountable, the potential rewards are also great. In the field of
Homeric epic, in fact, a comparative approach famously bore fruit in the oralformulaic theory of Parry and Lord, who used the compositional methods of living
Yugoslavian bards as evidence in the analysis of the Homeric epic. Not coincidentally, Beecroft draws considerably on the insights of this theory ( particularly as
presented in more recent scholarship by Gregory Nagy and others), and so by
authorship refers not so much to the original composition of a work, of which we
often have meager factual evidence, as its later performance, transmission, and
circulation.
In the practice this means that in the Greek half of the book Beecroft is interested primarily in biographical narratives about authors, while in the Chinese half
he is interested primarily in the quotation and interpretation of Shijing poems. In
the Greek case, Beecroft criticizes the habit of modern scholars to denigrate these
narratives for their biographical fallacy ( presuming that all the contents of a
literary work must directly inscribe facts of the author’s life) and terms this habit
the “reverse biographical fallacy” ( p. 2). In place of the reverse biographical fallacy,
he argues, we ought to read these narratives as a kind of “implied poetics” ( p. 2) or
“implicit poetics” ( p. 26), that indirectly offer us various proposals about the
significance of a poem, rather than merely criticizing the sources for historical
inaccuracy.
Beecroft’s presentation of both concepts is a clear and helpful contribution to
literary scholarship. It is surely correct to find in these biographical narratives
critical perspectives on the uses of literature, which are as important as the more
famous statements of explicit poetic theory that tend to dominate scholarly
­discourse. Moreover, this is exactly the kind of issue for which the comparative
approach ought to be useful. Just as Parry, Lord, and later adherents made use of
living evidence to gain a better understanding of the principles behind the
Homeric epic, Beecroft can make use of the Chinese tradition, in some respects
more fully documented than that of ancient Greece, to test some of his hypotheses.
46 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
However, this sort of direct inference is rare in the book. The conceptual
framework is comparative and intended to apply to both Chinese and Greek
sources separately, but there are few cases where Beecroft makes an explicit
­comparison; when he does, it tends to be at quite a high level of abstraction. This
caution about direct comparisons leads to one possible limitation of the book, that
the individual chapters in the Greek and Chinese sections of the book (three of
each) essentially stand alone as essays in classics and sinology, respectively. There
is also an introduction, a conclusion, and one comparative chapter, which do
present the case for looking at Greece and China together. Beecroft mentions, for
example, “the particular appropriateness of these two literatures to revealing the
shifting of relationships between literatures and their political/social environments
over the longue durée” ( p. 5). In practice, though, the main justification becomes a
methodological one: the use of narratives about authorship as a kind of implicit
poetics to supplement explicit statements of literary criticism. This methodology
does seem very reasonable, but reliance on it as the comparative element also
raises the question of whether the sources deserve to be compared on their own
terms.
Overall, the book is a thoroughly researched and innovative study, in which
close readings of Greek and Chinese sources are placed in a dense conceptual
framework, but it also suffers from some serious limitations, particularly in the
treatment of Chinese sources. Though this review will focus on the Chinese half
of this book, all of these points have implications for the comparative framework
as well. It is not sufficient for the universal to encompass the particular, but the
particular must also intimate the universal.
Perhaps the most original feature of the book is Beecroft’s attempt to place
literary developments in both Greece and China, indeed throughout the world,
within a sixfold scheme: epichoric, panchoric, cosmopolitan, vernacular, national,
and global (only the first three being relevant for the period under consideration).
Here “epichoric” is a synonym for “local,” which Nagy uses in contradistinction to
Panhellenic. This is a distinction of immediate concern in the study of Greek
poetry (forms of the word “Panhellenic” occur in the Iliad and other early texts),
but transporting it whole cloth to ancient China seems of limited value. Beecroft
goes so far as to coin the word “Panhuaxia” and, thence, to distinguish in Chinese
materials epichoric and Panhuaxia strata. This usage is not wrong so much as
beside the point, as is the use of “cosmopolitan” to refer to the ideology of Han
empire.1 On the other hand, in both cultures there was a parallel transformation,
in which texts of local origin became classics venerated throughout a broad region,
so the overly ambitious theoretical scheme does not lead the author too far
astray.
The first chapter, “Explicit Poetics in Greece and China,” is a subtle and convincing comparison of the primary discussions of poetry by Aristotle and Plato
Reviews 47
with that of the Mao preface to the Shijing and related texts. Beecroft finds a
similarity in understandings of poetry and performance in the two traditions: just
as mimesis begins as a dramatic reenactment of a scene, then gradually becomes a
mere textual representation, so the practice of fu shi 賦詩, “presenting a poem,”
allows for free performance but is replaced in the Han by increasing focus more on
textual composition. Beecroft distinguishes subtly but carefully between the usages
of particular authors, building up a clear picture of how composition and performance were seen as interrelated, overlapping processes in both Greece and China.
His suggestion of how shu 述 functions similarly to Greek mimesis is particularly
insightful, and throughout he shows clearly how Greek and Chinese theories of
poetry are more similar than they often appear in modern discussions, particularly
when implicit poetics is taken into consideration.
One oversight in translation, while not posing a direct obstacle to his arguments, does indicate some limitations to them. Intending to show that the meaning of fu had shifted clearly to “authorship” in the Han dynasty, Beecroft quotes the
line from Sima Qian’s (145–86 b.c.e.) letter to Ren An: 屈原放逐，乃賦離騷, and
translates “Qu Yuan was exiled, and so he recited (in the sense of composed)
Encountering Sorrow” ( p. 56).2 Then in his analysis, Beecroft makes clear that he
understands fu 賦 here to mean specifically “composed,” based on Sima Qian’s
overall portrait of Qu Yuan, and in particular the related passage in his biography
of Qu Yuan, which relates that Qu Yuan “composed the ‘Li sao’ ” 作離騷.3 Incidentally, he fails to mention the very similar passage in Sima Qian’s autobiographical
postface to the Shi ji, with the variant zhu 著, also “composed.”4 More importantly,
the variant in Sima Qian’s letter, the earliest text of which is preserved in Ban Gu’s
Han shu, could easily bear the alternate interpretation of “composed the fu poem
‘Li sao,’ ” since the fu by Sima Qian’s time, and even more by Ban Gu’s, was a
well-established genre, with the “Li sao” and other poems of the Chuci generally
seen as its source and inspiration. In fact, in the five pages Beecroft devotes to the
word fu, culminating in the consideration of Sima Qian’s usage, he pays hardly any
notice to the literary genre, which is mischaracterized as “a particularly spectacular
form of prose-poem, popular in the Western Han” ( p. 53), twelve words containing
two half-truths and an error.5 All this is rather tangential to Beecroft’s main argument, but it does seem like a lost opportunity, since he spends so much of the book
discussing Han sources ( principally the Mao commentary to the Shijing), all the
while overlooking the fascinating discourse in that period surrounding the poetic
tradition of the fu. I would point, in particular, to the enormously rich representation of authorship and performance within the Han fu.6 It may be that no conception of authorship mentioned in this book is as sophisticated as that exemplified in
the works of the Han fu poets.
Beecroft’s one-sided focus on the Shijing, on the Chinese side, contrasts with
his expansive treatment of Greek genres on the other. The second through fourth
48 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
chapters of the book cover, in turn, epic, lyric, and “authorship between epic and
lyric” ( p. 144), respectively. The second chapter reads the Lives of Homer as offering
differing accounts of the history of Homeric poetry. For instance, an identification
of Homer’s birthplace may naturally be understood as an assertion of local pride,
while other lives may offer specific accounts about the transmission and recension
of epic poetry. Similarly, in the third chapter, he focuses on accounts of the lives of
the lyric poets Terpander, Alcman, and Sappho. In each case, he provides a plausible, if admittedly speculative, justification for that account that evades the reverse
biographical fallacy. There is an interesting discussion of a bizarre story about
Sappho in Herodotus and its possible significance as a comment on the relationship between history and poetry, fiction making and truth. Perhaps most memorable of the Greek chapters is the fourth on the famous Palinode by Stesi­chorus,
retracting his own claim in an earlier poem that Helen had never been abducted
and taken to Troy. Supplying a new interpretation of an Oxyrhynchus papyrus that
mentions two different Palinodes by Stesichorus, Beecroft argues that the Palinode
may have been a performance genre with countless possible realizations, not just
one or two poems, which would conveniently resolve a number of contradictions
in the sources (though Occam’s razor would cause some to prefer a solution that
does not require so many hypothetical poems beyond our extant ones).
Toward the end of the fourth chapter, Beecroft formulates one component of
his thesis in an economical way: “Genealogy becomes a metonymic system by
which the relationships between literary genres can be understood” ( p. 169). In
other words, features of poets’ biographies, such as genealogy, should be understood as abstract schemes representing relations between genres and indicating
their relative value. The utility of this kind of approach for the study of Chinese
poetry is manifest. There is a temptation for a modern scholar simply to ignore the
anecdotes in the Mao commentary or biographical accounts of Qu Yuan on the
basis of the reverse biographical fallacy; we speculate that these accounts have
been composed to fit the evidence of the poem and have no greater historical
weight. Beecroft reminds us that they can be valuable historical evidence of another
kind, if we read them with the proper appreciation of their original motives.
In the fifth to seventh chapters, Beecroft applies the theoretical and methodological framework developed in the first half of the book to Chinese texts.
­Beecroft is highly familiar with the secondary scholarship in English on early
China and also provides passable translations of primary sources. A general
weakness of these chapters, though, is that Beecroft is relatively unfamiliar with
modern Chinese scholarship, which might have helped him to focus his analyses
more clearly within the textual tradition. One does wish there were a recent
scholarly translation of the Shijing to which he (or anyone else) might refer instead.
It is an embarrassment to Western sinology that no one has recently built upon the
splendid foundation of Legge, Waley, and Karlgren.
Reviews 49
The last three chapters only rarely even mention authorship per se, but instead
are focused on the performance, quotation, and interpretation of the Shijing in
Warring States and Han China. The three chapters cover a diverse set of topics, as
shown by their titles: “Death and Lingerie: Cosmopolitan and Panhuaxia Readings
of the Airs of the States,” “Summit at Fei: The Poetics of Diplomacy in the Zuozhuan,” and “The Politics of Dancing: The Great King Wu Dance and the Hymns of
Zhou.” The first title is quite misleading, since the fifth chapter is really about how
indexical readings of the Shijing (i.e., identifying poems with particular historical
events) came to replace more performative ones. This chapter makes a satisfying use
of Aristotle’s definition of mimesis as houtos ekeinos (“this is that”), showing how
historical analysis and textual interpretation reinforce one another in the quotation of the Shijing ( pp. 195–197). This is the kind of original reading, grounded
in a comparative perspective, of which one wishes there were even more in the
book.
“Summit at Fei” likewise analyzes the Shijing quotations used in the diplomatic summit held in the thirteenth year of Duke Wen at Fei 棐. Beecroft argues
that the quotation of these poems should be described as “an open and flexible
language, with plenty of room for ambiguity, irony, and deception” ( p. 239).
­Perhaps in order to demonstrate that this claim is not so obvious as to go without
saying, he chooses to frame it as a rebuttal of François Jullien’s interpretation of the
same texts, which Beecroft presents as a claim that meaning is entirely fixed and
stable therein.7 I would question whether this accurately describes Jullien’s position
in general, but in any case, in elaborating this critique, Beecroft makes a spectacular error: he criticizes Jullien for applying a Mencius quotation inappropriately,
when, in fact, Jullien is citing the Chunqiu shihua 春秋詩話 by Lao Xiaoyu 勞孝輿
(1697–1746), and it is Lao who employs the Mencius quotation in question (leaving
aside the fundamental problem that the phrase bu yan er yu 不言而喻 is not really
a quotation, just a commonplace idiom). Beecroft then exacerbates this error by
claiming that Jullien’s argument is of a kind especially inappropriate for “non-­
Chinese Sinologists” ( p. 213) to make, since it plays into Orientalist tropes. Beecroft might have profited from reading other passages of the same book, as when
Jullien points out that “D’une façon générale, ce qui conditionne cet art de la
citation, et rend possible son usage rhétorique, est que les poèmes ne sont jamais
citès, à l’occasion des entrevues diplomatiques, en fonction de ce qui serait leur
sens propre. Celui qui « cite » ne prétend pas interpréter la signification originelle
du poème, ne songe même pas à en proposer une lecture particulière.”8 This
passage suggests how much Jullien also appreciates the subtlety of the “art of
quotation,” and, moreover, it would have been a useful corrective to Beecroft’s
methodology, which relies on comparing the quotation of poems by Warring
States diplomats and Han commentarial traditions as if the two had similar intent.
In any case, the attempted rebuttal of Jullien via identity politics (“non-Chinese”)
50 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
is inappropriate in itself, and doubly so given Beecroft’s own misrepresentation of
both Jullien’s argument and its Chinese sources.
Unfortunately, the seventh chapter also opens with an inaccurate description of another scholar’s work, when Beecroft implies ( p. 240) that C. H. Wang’s
hypothetical Weniad was drawn from the “Zhou Song” 周頌 section of the
­Shijing and not the “Da ya” 大雅 (there is an ambiguous “some of the poems”
here that should have been caught in the editing process). The bulk of this chapter,
though, consists of solid comparisons of readings of the “Zhou Song.” These are
difficult poems, highly significant for our understanding of the earliest period of
Chinese literature and culture, and definitely deserve more of the close readings
Beecroft offers here. However, the discussion occasionally gets bogged down in
comparison of commentators, and Beecroft tends to end up picking whatever
interpretation is most convenient to his argument, often overestimating our
knowledge of what these poems meant before the Han.9 In any case, to ground a
theory of China’s development from a panchoric to a cosmopolitan stage on the
difference between glosses by the Mao commentary and by Ma Ruichen seems a
bit farfetched.
I have focused on some problematic questions of detail within the last two
chapters, but these by no means nullify the value of Beecroft’s book as a thoughtprovoking treatment of its subject. The single thought it provokes most intensely in
this reader is that the nature of authorship in early China is more multidimensional
than Beecroft’s presentation suggests. For example, Beecroft approaches problems
of authorship with the term “scene of authorship” ( p. 18), which seems a fitting way
to describe many of the narratives of authorship he presents, though much less
appropriate for the Chinese sources than the Greek ones. The lives of the poets
may often function primarily as a way of presenting the drama of authorship,
giving some special justification for the value and identity of a work. In a lengthy
footnote ( p. 18 n. 30), Beecroft explains that he is borrowing the term from
­Derrida’s essay “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” but in spite of the fundamental
importance of this concept and Derrida’s treatment of it to Beecroft’s argument,
this is the only explicit appearance of Derrida or Freud in the book. Yet a number
of the issues developed in the book seem almost to cry out for a Freudian or
Derridean reading: the psychological tensions concealed by a simple narrative of
authorship, the myriad gaps and omissions that are created by each new account of
origins. Beecroft makes an excellent case that the author is “a dramatization of the
social forces concentrated on poetry” and that “[s]cenes of authorship are not
biographical narratives; they are rather places in which conflicting ideas about
literature are dramatized” ( p. 18 n. 30). But this depersonalized and nonpsychological approach makes some of the sources read more like contributions to an
ACLA panel than myths of human expression.
Thus, Beecroft does not give quite enough attention, for my taste, to the
mythic significance of Stesichorus’s blinding, for instance. More important for his
Reviews 51
overall argument, though, is his failure to discuss the most prominent examples of
the explicit poetics of authorship in early China. He quotes in full Mao 204, which
concludes “A gentleman composed this song / To tell of his sorrow” 君子作歌，
維以告哀, but hardly devotes any analysis to this telling statement ( pp. 219–222).
Or, as we have seen, he refers to Sima Qian’s statement about previous authors, but
quotes only a single clause about Qu Yuan, neglecting the full context. Yet this is a
passionate defense of a particular theory that authorship originates in suffering:10
昔
Long ago
西伯拘羑里
The Earl of the West was imprisoned at Youli,
演周易
and elaborated on the Changes of Zhou;
孔子戹陳蔡
Confucius, undone in Chen and Cai,
作春秋
composed the Spring and Autumn Annals;
屈原放逐
Qu Yuan, exiled,
著離騷
wrote Encountering Sorrow;
左丘失明
Zuo Qiu lost his sight,
厥有國語
and there was the Accounts of the States;
孫子臏腳
Sunzi had his feet amputated,
而論兵法
and discoursed on the Art of War;
不韋遷蜀
Buwei was exiled to Shu,
世傳呂覽
and the world passed on his Observations of Master Lü
韓非囚秦
Han Fei, imprisoned in Qin, [wrote]
說難孤憤
“Persuasion’s Difficulty” and “Solitary Indignation”;
詩三百篇
And the three hundred Songs
大抵賢聖發Were mostly composed by worthies and sages out of
憤之所為作也 their indignation.
The passage contains narratives of authorship for key works in the literary tradition up to Sima Qian’s time, building up a theory that could be read as explicitly
opposed to cultural identity: here it is only when the writer is rejected by his
culture that he finds his voice. Beecroft would have done well to include more of
the explicit points of view that conflict with his own narrative, rather than expending so much effort on philological cruxes in Shijing interpretation.11
I should make one final remark on the formatting of the book. Beecroft often
ignores the original metrical divisions of his poetic texts, combining separate
Chinese lines in his English translations of Shijing poems. For instance, he transforms Mao 285, originally consisting of seven four-character lines, into an English
quatrain ( p. 247) and combines stanzas of Mao 204 ( pp. 219–220). Of course, the
original Chinese texts do not have line breaks per se, but it is so customary to
indicate rhythmical divisions with English line breaks that Beecroft’s choice here is
perplexing. His translations are not prose glosses, since they usually have line
breaks; the line breaks simply do not follow the rhythmical divisions of the original poems as they do in other English translations of Chinese poetry. Greek poetry
on occasion suffers the same fate (e.g., p. 139). This suggests an indifference to
the poetry itself which seems inappropriate for a work of this kind. In the final
52 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
analysis, I do not see any way for authorship to exist without authors, nor poets
without poems.
Nicholas Morrow Williams
Nicholas Morrow Williams is currently a research assistant professor at the Mr.
Simon Suen and Mrs. Mary Suen Sino-Humanitas Institute, Hong Kong Baptist
University.
Notes
1. Note that Sheldon Pollock, cited as the source for the usage of “cosmopolitan,” explicitly
differentiates the Roman or Han cases from his Sanskrit cosmopolis, “a universalism that never
objectified, let alone enforced, its universalism.” See The Language of the Gods in the World of
Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006), p. 12.
2. Han shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 62.2735.
3. Shi ji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003), 84.2482.
4. Shi ji 130.3300. For more on this passage, see David R. Knechtges, “‘Key Words,’ Authorial Intent, and Interpretation: Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles,
and Reviews 30 (2008): 75–84.
5. (1) Many early fu are not spectacular but introspective and gloomy; (2) the fu is primarily
a verse form, although some fu contain prose introductions or transitions (which have nothing in
common with a prose poem); and (3) it remained popular long after the Western Han.
6. For a good overview, see Obi Kōichi 小尾郊一, “Kan dai no jifu to sono gorakusei — mondōtai to kakū jimbutsu” 漢代の辞賦とその娯楽性――問答体と架空人物, in Shinjitsu to
kyokō — Rikuchō bungaku 真実と虚構――六朝文学 (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1994), pp. 1–30.
7. Specifically, the fourth chapter, “Par Citations interposées,” of Le Détour et l’accés:
Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1995).
8. “In general, what determines this art of quotation and enables its rhetorical function is
the fact that, in these diplomatic exchanges, the poems are never quoted in their original sense.
The one who ‘quotes’ makes no claim to be explained the original meaning of the poem, nor even
to be proposing a particular reading of it” [my translation], ibid., p. 105.
9. Our state of knowledge is in flux here, but one useful study that has come out recently
(too late for this book) is Chen Zhi 陳致, “Cong ‘Zhou Song’ yu jinwen zhong chengyu de
yunyong lai kan gu geshi zhi yongyun ji siyan shiti de xingcheng” 從周頌與金文中成語的運用
來看古歌詩之用韻及四言詩體的形, in Kua xueke shiye xia de Shijing yanjiu 跨學科視野下的
詩經研究, ed. Chen Zhi (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2010), pp. 17–59.
10. Shiji 130.3300. I have arranged the line breaks to reflect the parallel structure and
rhythm of the text.
11. It is true that Sima Qian lived in the Western Han, and so, perhaps, postdates the scope
of “early China” in Beecroft’s title; but much of the book concerns the nearly contemporaneous
Mao commentary.
Reviews 53
Nanlai Cao. Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in
Contemporary Wenzhou. East-West Center Series on Contemporary Issues
in Asia and the Pacific. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. xii,
216 pp. Paperback $21.95, isbn 978-0-8047-7360-7.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Nanlai Cao’s Constructing China’s Jerusalem is an impressive achievement. It both
fills an important gap in the literature and also gives us a scholarly understanding
of contemporary Chinese Christianity. There are few such works, and more works
like it are needed.
Cao is a particularly deft guide of the local Christian community in the
southeast coastal city of Wenzhou, a dynamic center of global capitalism and
China’s largest urban center of Christianity, with over one million Protestant
Christians ( p. 1). He is uniquely suited for his task because — over a nineteenmonth period between 2004 and 2006 — he did both formal and informal interviews in Mandarin with about seventy church members, some of whom he
repeatedly interviewed. Indeed, during his many months of fieldwork, he would
often rush from one church to another, and so he had a personal view of some of
the complexities of the contemporary church scene. Cao also has family based in
Wenzhou, which allowed him a more profound understanding of the local situation. In this process, Cao also gained the trust of some powerful church leaders
who gave him nearly free rein to investigate the inner workings of the Wenzhou
church. They were looking for prestige; he was looking to do a thorough study.
Further, Cao has a unique perspective in understanding Christianity from the
inside as well. He had studied at Fordham University and done research on the
immigrant Chinese church in New York City. He also identifies himself as a cultural Christian, a sympathizer with no personal commitment. Indeed, some
church members told him that they were comfortable sharing delicate internal
politics and other subject areas with him, because of his sympathetic stance, but
also because of his outsider (and thus more objective) status.
In addition, Cao has also done the hard work necessary to produce this
strong volume. As the author himself implies, doing ethnographic work on contemporary Christianity in China is not always easy. There are the obvious source
limitations, the still existing political sensitivities of studying what some still
consider a foreign religion, and the lack of a critical apparatus on the part of local
Christians to articulate fully their own experiences. Nanlai Cao has been able to
turn all of these limitations to his advantage. He has accessed important historical
documents, he has benefited from the now semiprivileged status that Protestantism seems to enjoy in the city (and which he describes so well), and he has turned
his conversations and observations of Wenzhou Christians into ethnographic gold.
He has also engaged the finest and most current social science research. Finally,
54 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
he — quite deliberately — employs a narrative approach to describe his findings.
This fact makes the work quite readable and — often times — quite enjoyable as
well.
Some of the author’s main questions are: “How has it been possible for
­Christianity to achieve such high visibility and popularity among diverse groups of
people in one of China’s most commercialized regional economies?” “Who are the
key social actors maneuvering behind such high-profile activities?” “How have
they managed to negotiate such a massive space for the local church and refashion
a nontraditional religious identity in the public arena?” ( pp. 3–4).
Throughout his work, Cao calls into question the usefulness of always seeing a
dichotomy between civil society and the state. He also questions the paradigm of
state domination and religious resistance. Indeed, the Wenzhou “Christian revival
has taken place under the conditions of a modernizing state, lax local governance,
an emerging capitalist consumer economy, and greater spatial mobility among
individuals” ( p. 11). With such conditions being met, we are thus a long way from
the situation of Christians during the socialist high tide and during the Cultural
Revolution.
At one point, one of Cao’s interlocutors, a Christian businessman — or “boss
Christian” as they are referred to throughout the book — tells him that “Wenzhou
used to be known for counterfeits and fakes. Now we need to make Christianity a
new brand of the city” ( p. 165). Indeed, the chief protagonists in constructing the
new brand in “China’s Jerusalem” are these boss Christians.
A small caveat is needed here. Richard Madsen reminds me that, in fact,
“Wenzhou is a place of very lively religious ferment of all kinds. There are not only
boss Christians, but boss Confucians and revivals of many kinds of traditional folk
religion. Not to mention a very lively Catholic church, both official and
underground.”1
We can quickly trace the trajectory of the book through the lens of these boss
Christians, those with the resources and training that help spur on the continued
growth of Christianity in Wenzhou. To this end, after the introduction, the second
chapter traces the rise of these boss Christians. Cao argues that while Protestantism in contemporary China has been seen as rural, poor, and female, these boss
Christians present a powerful male image of the church. He further shows that
they are not backward or conservative like many of their rural counterparts; rather,
they are schooled in the ways of the world. It is but a short step between managing
a successful business (and some of these boss Christians are, indeed, fabulously
wealthy) and managing a successful megachurch, evangelistic enterprise, or
even — in the case of one highly place Communist Party official (and Christian) — managing the Wenzhou government.
The third chapter investigates how these boss Christians remake their own
Christian identity. In fact, a common narrative is that some of them were Chris-
Reviews 55
tians as early as the 1970s. They then fell away from the church while they climbed
the ladder of economic success. Some of them have now come back to bring their
talents to the church as part of “redeeming the blessing” ( p. 42). Indeed, many
Wenzhou Protestants are intimately linked with global capitalism, and there are
sizeable communities of Wenzhou people across Europe and the United States.
This chapter also shows how boss Christians negotiate through a maze of corrupt
practices and temptations in the bustle of the business world.
The fourth chapter takes up the spirituality of these newly wealthy boss
Christians and their attempts to distance themselves from an uncouth past. Cao
uses the Wenzhou model of Christian revival “as a central metaphor for examining
the cultural linkages between the entrepreneurial outlook of the boss Christians
and local church development” ( p. 75). Tellingly, in this chapter, we see the boss
Christians use Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a “howto manual” ( p. 75). Cao deliberately does not focus so much on belief, but on
practice. We see the always pragmatic boss Christians building larger churches and
mounting increasingly grander evangelistic banquets and conferences. We also see
these churches splitting and multiplying.
Chapter 5 looks at gender as a useful organizing principle ( p. 97). This chapter
explores “how gender differences and hierarchies are validated, modified, and
reproduced through the experiences and practices of Wenzhou Christians” ( p. 97).
In this chapter, Cao notes the continued opposition between the rural and female
nature of much of Chinese Protestantism and “an elite, rational masculinity fostered
by China’s economic reforms” ( p. 98). For starters, there is gender-­separated
seating in many of the churches. In addition, the bottom line is that the males
often preach, lead, and attend theology lectures, while the women do nearly all of
the auxiliary work ( pp. 99–100).
Chapter 6 takes up the issue of the rural migrants of which by 2003 there were
about two million in the Wenzhou region ( p. 127). How do these rural migrants — often isolated and unable to speak the Wenzhou dialect — interact with the local
Christians? There are some interesting stories. A certain Chenbin, a migrant from
Anhui and a new Christian, thought of becoming a full-time preacher. However,
he found himself ignored by a fellow church brother outside of the church, and no
local Christian woman would marry him because of his outside status. When Cao
met with him later on, he learned that Chenbin had given up his idea of becoming
a preacher and “no longer attended church regularly” ( p. 144).
Finally, Cao concludes by showing that the Wenzhou case “refutes the oncepopular prediction that capitalist modernity would lead to inevitable secularization” ( p. 163). Modernization clearly has not brought about secularization. Further,
he once again calls into question the domination-resistance model. Wenzhou
Protestantism is not “inherently antistate and antihegemonic” ( p. 164). Rather,
Wenzhou Protestants show “that the presence of a business community organized
56 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
at the grassroots level can not only negotiate changes in church-state relations but
also move Christianity from the margins to the mainstream of Chinese society in
everyday maneuvers” ( p. 163).
As I mentioned earlier, my own assessment is extremely positive. I would just
like to point out some further areas of discussion and research. This is a fine and
readable work of social science. It also makes some forays into the theological
realm, especially in the interesting discussion of versions of the Bible used by
Wenzhou Protestants and the practical impact of some Christian beliefs. Future
researchers may want to follow these leads. Further, Cao aims at a “historically
grounded analysis” ( p. 8). He is especially grounded in his historical analysis of
post-Mao Wenzhou. We also learn a little bit about Wenzhou’s Christian history
before 1976: Protestantism was first planted in the area in 1867 (by a Scottish
missionary), and, in time, Christian institutions were constructed. The Cultural
Revolution also caused its share of suffering. Historians may want to further these
historical findings. Cao has paved the way. He notes that he had access to some
important historical archives. In a footnote he mentions that they came from the
“Archives of Wenzhou Christianity” ( p. 186 n. 9). Future researchers would benefit
from more specific information, such as accession numbers.
In addition, as someone who has found the domination-resistance model
quite helpful, I can appreciate, and even find refreshing, the fact that current day
Wenzhou may problematize the continuing usage of such a model. However,
future researchers may still find the domination-resistance model quite durable. At
least in part, it should continue to help us to understand the situation of other
Christian churches in China, those separated by time or by space.
However, these are simply areas of further discussion and research. Overall,
this is an excellent work. Finally we have an in-depth analysis of Christianity in
postsocialist China. Indeed, Cao is at his strongest in showing how Protestantism,
at least in Wenzhou, has been able to carve out for itself a relatively ample place in
the public sphere, and that it has seen a confluence between its own goals and
those of the developmentalist state. Ultimately, these Wenzhou Christians want to
contribute not only to China’s development, but “to world Christianity, not as
God’s martyrs but as resourceful negotiating agents” ( p. 172).
Paul P. Mariani
Paul P. Mariani is an assistant professor of history at Santa Clara University and the
author of Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011).
Note
1. Personal communication.
Reviews 57
Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project.
Settlement Patterns in the Chifeng Region. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Center for Comparative Archaeology, 2011. 153 pp.
Paperback $29.00, isbn 978-1-877812-91-0.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
This volume reports the result of six seasons of archaeological field survey in a
delineated region near Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, China, carried out between 1999
and 2007. The book comprises five chapters: “Introduction”; “Stratigraphic Testing,
Ceramics, and Chronology”; “Environment”; “Settlement Analysis”; and
“Sequence of Social Change.” The two appendices are “Glossary of Chinese Characters” and “Electronic Access to Color Illustrations and the Full Database.” Many
useful tables, graphs, and figures are included, but I recommend accessing them
electronically to view them in color, which substantially improves their readability.
This is a specialized volume, essentially an analysis of the survey in English.
This is not a synthetic overview of the archaeological cultures of the region, nor is
it intended to be. Contributors include Chinese, American, and Israeli authors
who participated in the survey. The statistics and graphs describe distributions of
the data collected and assessments of the resulting settlement patterns of the
Chifeng region from about 6000 b.c.e. to 1000 c.e. As such, it will be important
reading not only for other researchers in Chinese archaeology but also those who
plan similar surveys in other regions of China or elsewhere in the world. It is an
outstanding example of careful explanations of why certain methods of surveying
and collecting data were selected and how they were applied, problems encountered, and statistical interpretations of the data.
The introductory chapter by Katheryn Linduff, of the University of Pittsburgh,
and Ta La, of the Inner Mongolian Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology,
describes the Chifeng project and how the collaboration came about. The early
development of this region, independent from the Central Plain of China, has
been long understood by archaeologists in northern China. It is well documented
by the data collected in this project. It is, therefore, of particular importance to
researchers of ancient China, historians as well as archaeologists.
Chapter 2 is divided into five parts: “Introduction”; “Stratigraphic Testing,
Ceramics, and Chronology”; “Environment”; “Settlement Analysis”; and
“Sequence of Social Change.” The sections are largely descriptions of these categories of data. The surface survey data are augmented by subsurface data from two
excavated sites to compare the relationship of the surface scatters with the subsurface remains. The test excavations provided new carbon-14 dates that refined the
time periods used by Chinese archaeologists. The subsequent analysis uses compromise dates between the dates currently in use in China and the new dates from
the excavations: ­Xinglongwa period, about 6000–5250 b.c.e.; Zhabaogou period,
5250–4500 b.c.e.; Hongshan, about 4500–3000 b.c.e.; Xiaoheyan, 3000–2000
58 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
b.c.e.; Lower Xiajiadian, 2000–1200 b.c.e.; Upper Xiajiadian, 1000–600 b.c.e.;
Zhanguo-Han, 600 b.c.e.–200 c.e.; and Liao, 200–1300 c.e. This sequence, previously established by Chinese archaeologists, was based largely on pottery chronology. The survey was based on pottery types, which are described and illustrated.
While the final results modify the dates for these periods, the sequence of cultures
remains in place. The ceramic chronology has a tendency to reify the cultures, but
for long-term analysis of change through time, the series makes a useful framework. Stone and bone tools and floral and faunal analyses described in this chapter
add more precision to previous chronology. An important finding from the test
pits is that most of the botanical samples were domesticated species and most of
the bones analyzed came from domesticated animals. While archaeologists who
know this region are aware of the extent of the very early and continuous domestication of plants and animals, the notion that nomads were the main occupants
continues to appear in writings that privilege the texts of Chinese history over
archaeological discoveries. Thus, the finding that villages with domesticated plants
and animals dominate in all time periods is important.
Chapter 3 discusses the environment, with sections on the natural environment, climate change in the past 10,000 years, and geomorphology. Climate trends
vary by location, particularly the alternation between wet and dry periods, which
affected settlement selection. The discussion of locations of sites in relation to
topography is usefully related to local changes in climate. For example, valley
bottoms became uninhabitable in times when they were subject to flooding, and
severe droughts made different regions at times uninhabitable.
With the data collection methods and the analysis of artifacts and ecofacts
detailed, and dating and environmental variables refined, the heart of the book
explains the graphs that show settlement locations through time by culture. In
chapter 4 the process of settlement analysis is discussed. This chapter is divided
into four segments: “Field Survey Methods,” “Methods for Regional Survey Analysis,” “Methods for Delineating Community Patterns,” and “The Environmental
Basis for Settlement Distribution.” Each of these topics receives a technical discussion. One of the conclusions is that the amount of garbage (with ceramics as a
proxy for all garbage) per person per year is roughly the same, regardless of the
time period. This may be a tautology, since the population was estimated from the
number of sherds collected.
The final chapter sums up what was learned about social change, based on the
changing demographics and settlement placements through time, which was a
specific goal of the survey. Each time period is discussed, with plan views of site
locations as well as unsmoothed density surfaces. The data are rich and reward
close attention to the details of the plots.
Rather than summarizing the conclusions, I will comment on how analyzing
the settlement patterns based on the statistical analysis has changed the ways that
these cultures should be understood, as well as caution the reader about inter­
Reviews 59
preting the whole of each culture in terms of the subset that was found in this
survey. I am using the word “culture” as the Chinese do (wenwu), and accepting
the Chinese delimitations of these cultures in the following remarks.
Xinglongwa is the earliest pottery-making culture in the Dongbei, the
­Chinese northeast. Sites are found mostly in Inner Mongolia. In the survey area,
the sites are small, and “much of the Xinglongwa population lived in very small
hamlets or even single-family homesteads” ( p. 105). This finding contrasts strikingly with several sites farther south, in which houses were neatly arranged in
rows and the entire settlement was surrounded by a ditch — a pattern that suggests
a sizable group of people setting up a village all at once, rather than settlements
growing by natural increase or accretion. Several indications of ritual activity
have been found in these sites, including a stone carving of a female and a burial
with a fully grown pig flanking each side. A further study of wider patterns of
Xinglongwa settlements and the distribution of ritual sites would probably be
rewarding.
Inhabitants of this region who made pottery designated Zhoubaogou were
more numerous than those of Xinglongwa. Some of their villages were large, with
an estimated population of up to three hundred inhabitants. In Zhaobaogou
villages excavated by Chinese crews, a culture rich in symbolism is suggested
(Linduff 1995). The survey results find that they have no “centralized patterns of
regional scale organization” ( p. 105). This contrast suggests that looking for centralized patterns is not sufficient for understanding a growing complexity, because
the symbolic and ritual patterns, always strong in this region, continue to become
more elaborate through time and may indicate complexity that arises from different patterns than nucleation of larger and larger sites (Nelson 2008).
The Hongshan culture was named for a site in Chifeng City, not far from the
survey area. Hongshan presence in the survey area is strong, with an expanding
population density, although the largest sites are still within the range of large
Xinglongwa sites. Nevertheless, “some degree of supra-local centralization”
( p. 111) is indicated by the survey data. Considerable evidence of large-scale ritual
areas has been found outside the survey areas, described as “clearly part of the
same package of social organization” ( p. 114) as some sites with one or two larger
buildings, which “might have been the residences of higher status families”
( p. 114). These Hongshan sites are quite distant from the ceremonial sites in Liaoning province, which can easily be described as moving toward complexity (Nelson
1995).
The Xiaoheyan culture is somewhat ephemeral, not only in the survey area
but throughout its range in the Dongbei. The results are difficult to comment on,
due to the scarcity of remains. Xiaoheyan is designated by Chinese archaeologists
as a separate culture both because of its unusual pottery and because it fills a
chronological spot, but it is otherwise enigmatic and thinly represented in the
larger region.
60 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Lower Xiajiadian shows a much more diverse population than previous times,
including an increase in local bronze production (Wagner 2006). Populations are
estimated at 40,000 to 80,000 inhabitants of the survey region. Small local communities continued to exist, but large aggregations with up to 5,000 people are
reasonably called towns. The distribution of these towns, showing up as “roughly
similar-sized tall peaks” in the graphs, “does not suggest political centralization but
rather separate small polities” ( p. 120). Stone constructions described (without
comment) as fortifications are shown to be spread among these small polities. This
situation “suggests that these small polities were in a more or less constant state of
hostilities with each other” ( p. 120). Even if these structures are fortifications,
rather than having a ceremonial function, the presence of so many walls might
instead suggest a common enemy, or the experience of being raided by groups
outside the survey region. The fortifications are “heavily concentrated toward the
west and especially the northwest of the survey area” ( p. 120), suggesting the
possibility that a survey in that direction might reveal evidence of raiding groups.
Lower Xiajiadian metal artifacts suggest intense interaction with cultures from the
northwest, as noted by the authors.
The Upper Xiajiadian population in the survey area is about twice as large as
that of Lower Xiajiadian, but materials were unexpectedly sparse in the eastern
segment of the survey area. Several large towns are indicated by concentrations of
potsherds. They are interpreted as numerous small polities centered in towns with
extensive architectural remains. Although early explanations of the remains of this
culture postulated a horse-dominated herding culture, the results of the survey do
not support such an interpretation in this area. Cattle and pig bones increase while
sheep and goat decline. This finding underscores the difficulties of sweeping
generalizations about subsistence based on the common use of pottery types. It
also suggests that more research regarding plant and animal remains would be
extremely useful in Inner Mongolia.
The Warring States period of the Zhou dynasty is grouped with Han dynasty
sites, apparently because the pottery is too similar to divide the eight hundred
years into segments. The combined data show a decrease in population, with few
towns. Material culture other than pottery is better for an understanding of this
time period in the Chifeng region. This region is particularly interesting during
the time of the tribal confederacies known to Chinese as the Xiongnu, Xianbei,
and Wu Huan (third century b.c.e. to third century c.e.) (Linduff 1997, pp. 18–98).
Their presence may help to account for the presence of Han dynasty hillforts.
Metal containers replaced pottery to a large extent, making these cultures essentially invisible in a pottery collection.
A large chronological gap between Han (206 b.c.e.–220 c.e.) and Liao (907–
1125 c.e.) is probably again explained by the emphasis on pottery. There were
Turkic people in this region between the Han and Liao periods. Lumping together
sites covering 1,100 years seems to me of dubious value. In terms of the analysis, a
Reviews 61
single Liao city dominates the demographics. More intensive craft specialization in
the cities is deduced from the density maps alone. The large cities and agricultural
base demonstrate that the Liao dynasty was not a nomadic civilization as the
Chinese records suggest. Indeed, agricultural was more important than nomadic
herding in this entire region, beginning with the earliest Xinglongwa sites. Since
this is contrary to standard Chinese history, it is important to emphasize.
There is much to learn about the archaeology of Inner Mongolia, as the results
from this survey demonstrate. The survey has just begun to scratch the surface
( pardon the metaphor), and shows the way to many fruitful further studies in this
region.
Sarah Milledge Nelson
Sarah Milledge Nelson is a John Evans Distinguished Professor Emerita at the
University of Denver.
References
Linduff, Katheryn. 1995. “Zhukaigou, Steppe Culture and the Rise of Chinese Culture.” Antiquity
69: 133–145.
Linduff, Katheryn, with Emma C. Bunker and Wu En. 1997. “An Archaeological Overview.” In
Ancient Bronzes of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes, ed. Emma C. Bunker. New York: Arthur
M. Sackler Foundation.
Nelson, Sarah M. 1995. “Ritualized Pigs and the Origins of Complex Society: Hypotheses regarding the Hongshan Culture.” Early China 20: 1–16.
—
——. 2008. Shamanism and the Origin of States: Spirit, Power and Gender in East Asia. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Wagner, Mayke. 2006. Neolithikum und Fruhe Bronzezeit in Nordchina vor 8000 bis 3500 Jahre.
Mainz, Germany: Verlag Philipp von Zabern.
John Dardess. Ming China 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient
Empire. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Litttlefield, 2012. xv, 155 pp.
Paperback $24.95, isbn 978-1-4422-0491-1.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
John Dardess is a senior and respected scholar of Ming history who has produced
many widely read works that cover a wide spectrum of issues. From important
discussions on the founding of the dynasty to one of the last major political
­struggles toward the end of the empire, from taking a macro view on the founding
professional elites to using a micro lens on literati from a single county — Dardess
has almost done it all.
62 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
With years of research and an in-depth understanding of the Ming, he is well
suited to write a concise history on the subject. It would be easier, although as
important, to write extensively and broadly on the Ming, such as the endeavor of
the Cambridge History series. It is much more difficult, however, to write briefly
on a big subject. The first daunting question to ask is, What questions ought to be
asked? How does one answer these questions in less than 200 pages? How should
one write so that the targeted readers stay interested?
Different historians would have approached the subject differently and taken
up different themes, as Dardess honestly points out. Dardess approaches it by
beginning with the outer edges of the Ming realm, thus providing us with a lively
description of the Ming’s frontiers. This first chapter helps readers situate the Ming
in its own neighborhood. It was very diverse, including small autonomous tribes
who wanted the Ming to leave them alone and countries that wanted to rule
China. The frontiers posed many different threats, from small-scale raiders to a
large East Asian crisis whereby the Ming had to deploy massive land and marine
troops to fight an expansive war on a foreign peninsula. The chapter is also a useful
map for readers to understand the many challenges the dynasty faced, and where
and why state resources were drained. In Dardess own words, the frontier management’s “mounting fiscal and human costs could not be sustained forever” ( p. 24).
Dardess arranges his five approaches in a cascade beginning with the frontiers; he then proceeds inward and arranges the remaining four themes in a topdown manner based on the power hierarchy in each chapter. He starts with the
emperors and continues with the officials responsible for Ming governance and the
closely connected literati. He leaves the outlaws that disturbed the social order for
last. Dardess provides a sketch of the sixteen Ming emperors with varying levels of
contributions to the dynasty, from as complex as founding the dynasty to as simple
as being a mere presence on the throne. Most of these men would probably have
had a hard time making a decent living with their own intellect and skills. However, according to Dardess, it really did not matter who ruled from the Forbidden
City after the first half century from the dynasty’s founding. Dardess argues that
other factors kept the dynasty intact, and its final collapse was inevitable since “not
even a long succession of wise and competent rulers would have sufficed to steer
Ming China over the shoals of the seventeenth century” ( p. 59).
The Ming lasted for almost three hundred years, and it was not sheer force
that kept it together. To Dardess, “some sort of national consensus about appro­
priate and legitimate power relations” was also at work ( p. 62). Beyond these, the
structure of the Ming government also contributed to the resilience of the empire.
In the Ming, powers overlapped and were divided among three major components:
military officers, civil officials, and palace eunuchs. Most important among the
three is the civil bureaucracy. Dardess first provides a summary of how civil
officials were recruited and sketches the structure of the various offices. They
played an important role that the other two groups could not because they were
Reviews 63
directly charged with the ruling of the populace, adjudicating their disputes, and
collecting most of the taxes. The next step is to assess the quality of the contributions of these civil officials. Overall, Dardess believes that many generations of
men had given the dynasty good and conscientious service. Although these
included the military officers and palace eunuchs, most of them were literati.
The story of the literati is even more complex. The educated class bloomed as
time passed. Accompanied with commercial prosperity and urbanization, these
men formed a large pool of readers, writers, playwrights, and intellectuals of all
sorts by the late Ming. The story of the Ming Neo-Confucians needs to be told
first since the Ming made Cheng-Zhu style Neo-Confucianism the only accepted
curriculum in the civil service examination. The Neo-Confucians’ story that
Dardess tells us focuses on the individuals who were defiant and innovative and
their entanglements with politics. There was also a strong Buddhist revival by the
second half of the sixteenth century. In addition to the clergy, it also involved
noblewomen and the literati. The late Ming also saw an intensified political activism by members of the Donglin and, later, by members from Fushe. These partisan
groups were prepared for power struggles with the palace eunuchs and their
literati allies. They were not challenging the dynastic order or power legitimacy of
the Ming emperors. Nonetheless, there were many who engaged less in philosophical or religious thoughts but indulged in the production and consumption of a
wide spectrum of literature. Whatever their preferred mode of self-expression or
plans to anchor their careers, it is crucial to note “the absences of any kind of
anti-regime thinking and organizing among them” ( p. 110). Dardess believes that
the Ming “clearly provided too grand and too comfortable a context for literati
self-fulfillment” ( p. 111). In other words, Ming China persisted “because the best
and the brightest were, on the whole, happy with it” ( p. 111).
It is, therefore, destabilizing factors, such as the outlaws, that posed a threat to
the Ming. Dardess reminds us, however, that the Ming was no stranger to outlaws
and internal turmoil and had been capable of dealing with such threats effectively.
According to Dardess, the ultimate nightmare of simultaneously mishandling
mounting internal conflicts and defending the borders from organized invasion of
the Manchus brought about the collapse of the Ming dynasty. The Ming capital of
Beijing was lost to the outlaws in 1644 and subsequently occupied by the Manchus.
Although the last Ming emperor committed suicide, China was not yet exactly
lost. It would be even more interesting if Dardess had further commented on the
regimes of Ming nobles and loyalists in the south and why they failed.
This concise history of Ming China is easy to read and informative for the
general reader. It will serve well as the first assigned reading for an advanced
undergraduate or even graduate class on Ming history. Historians working on the
Ming may also welcome the occasional joy of reading some forgotten anecdotes of
the many Ming figures. The book’s narrative is attractive and the selection of
themes brilliant. The length of the book, however, has made being analytical a
64 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
difficult task. Dardess’s attempt to explain the long durability of the Ming is not
quite successful. Why the Ming was resilient remains unclear, other than that,
perhaps, no one among the brightest minds was interested in overthrowing it. The
mechanism that actually ran the Ming state and society remains veiled. It was,
after all, not the dual challenges of external and internal military forces that
brought down the empire, but the inability to respond to them effectively. The
Ming state was unable to respond because of a broken mechanism that is not
clearly depicted here. In short, to understand this mechanism and its breakdown
requires a lot more reading on the various aspects of Ming history. A concise
history cannot accomplish that. The further reading Dardess suggests, although by
no means complete, is perhaps a good place to start for anyone who wishes to
explore the reasons further.
Khee Heong Koh
Khee Heong Koh is an associate professor in the Department of Chinese Studies,
National University of Singapore. His main research interest is Chinese intellectual
history.
Si-yen Fei. Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009. x, 361 pp.
Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0-674-03561-4.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Negotiating Urban Space, consisting of an introduction, four chapters, and a
conclusion, examines the characteristics of late Ming urbanization through four
case studies. The introduction, “A New Approach to Chinese Urbanism,” reviews
earlier influential studies of cities and urbanization in imperial China and contextualizes the approach and arguments of the book. Fei suggests that urbanization in
late imperial China was not simply the byproduct of rapid commercialization, but
also a process shaped by institutional and cultural practices particular to each
dynasty. She terms her approach “dynasty-centered” ( p. 26) and refers to urbanization in late imperial China as “dynastic urbanism” ( p. 252).
The first two chapters of the book probe Ming urbanism from an institutional
perspective. Chapter 1, “We Must Be Taxed,” relates a city-wide effort by Nanjing
residents in 1609 demanding that the government of Nanjing, the auxiliary southern capital of the post-1420 Ming dynasty, institute a property tax to replace the
irregular and oftentimes unbearable burden of labor service. The petition received
favorable responses from members of the administration, especially from its
Reviews 65
censor-in-chief Ding Bin (1543–1633), who eventually implemented a corvée
reform much welcomed by the local residents. The reform, Fei argues, provided an
urban space for public participation, consultation, and negotiation with the government. Similarly, chapter 2, “To Wall or Not to Wall,” also explores negotiation
and con­testation in urban spaces as it reconstructs a victorious elite-led crusade
against building defensive walls in 1590s Gaochun and an equally successful
government-initiated, pro-wall campaign in 1570s Jiangpu. Both were counties
under the jurisdiction of the Yingtian prefecture where Nanjing was located. Fei
believes that the cases presented in this chapter refute without equivocation the
conventional wisdom that the Ming dynasty was the epitome of Chinese despotism. She argues they confirm her position that urban space was a site of negotiation and cooperation between state and society in late Ming times.
The last two chapters examine urban space in late Ming Nanjing from a
cultural perspective. Chapter 3, “Imagining Nanjing: A Genealogy,” examines
two atlases and two tour-related books that projected different images of Ming
Nanjing. Fei argues that these four Ming publications represented two distinct
conceptions of the city in the Ming: one reflected the centralizing vision of the
founding emperor and the other the vision of Nanjing native elites. Chapter 4,
“Nanjing through Contemporary Mouths and Ears,” focuses on discussing the
approximately 550-character fengsu (social customs) treatise in Gu Qiyuan’s
­(1565–1628) Kezuo zhuiyu (Superfluous chats from the guests’ seats). According to
Fei, Gu divided Nanjing into eastern, central, southern, western, and northern
districts, and this division was different from the official demarcation of the city
into five administrative boroughs. Fei elaborates on Gu’s description of the five
districts in terms of social relations (renwen) and financial power (wuli) between
the native residents (zhu) and sojourning nonlocals (ke) and concludes that the
native-sojourner relationship was a key feature of late Ming society. In the concluding chapter, “Toward a New Perspective on Late Imperial Urbanism,” Fei
reflects on urbanism and urbanization in late Ming China and concludes that
urbanization not only created more and larger cities in China, but also prompted
the Chinese state and society to reconsider and reformulate the place of city in a
centralized rural empire.
In her studies of the four cases, Fei occasionally accepts Ming sources uncritically and elaborates on them excessively. An example can be found in her use of an
account in Gu’s Kezuo zhuiyu, which states that “when Chengzu (the Yongle
emperor, r. 1402–1424) moved the primary capital to Beijing, he ordered 27,000
civilian and artisan households to be moved (from Nanjing to Beijing). As a result,
the population of Nanjing dropped by more than half, and corvée labor services
were subsequently affected adversely” (juan 2, fangxiang shimo). Fei takes this
source at its face value without questioning its validity, and, moreover, mistranslates the last sentence as “the population of Nanjing dropped by half, as did ward
requisition” ( pp. 64–65). Students of Ming history generally agree that Nanjing’s
66 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
population during the Hongwu reign was at least 400,000 — in fact, Fei writes in
the book’s introduction that during the first half century of the Ming dynasty
(1368–1421) Nanjing “underwent significant physical expansion with population
growing to over half a million” ( p. 2). One might wonder how the removal of
27,000 households (each of which averaged five members in imperial China) could
reduce the population of Nanjing by more than half. Another case in point is that
chapter 4 is almost entirely based on the description of the social relations and
financial power between the native residents and sojourning nonlocals as well as
the impact of the rich and powerful residents on common people in five districts
of Nanjing described in the fengsu treatise of Gu’s Kezuo zhuiyu (juan 1). As a
native son of Nanjing, Gu’s knowledge of the city was presumably comprehensive,
but his highly simplified generalization of the common people in each of the
five districts as awkward and unsociable (eastern), superficial and competitive
(central), playful and extravagant (southern), reserved and destitute (northern),
and simplistic and depressed (western) suggests his account should not be taken as
an accurate and authoritative description of the Nanjing commoners. Certainly,
Fei needs to unpack this source more discerningly and ideally should supplement
it with more documentary evidence than she does.
Inconsistent use of concepts is another weakness of the book, and this occurs
frequently in chapter 2, where Fei often equates county with county seat. Take the
case of Gaochun. When she emphasizes the lack of wealth and shortage of manpower to build city walls, Gaochun is referred to as the county seat with a tiny area
and small population; on other occasions, Gaochun is indicated as a county with
“hundreds of thousands mu of fields” ( p. 98). Every Chinese county was and still is
composed of urban towns (with one of them serving as the county seat) and rural
cantons. Gaochun at the end of the sixteenth century was no exception and comprised the county seat Chunxi Town and other small towns, as well as a much
larger rural area divided into cantons. Although Fei’s argument about the antiwall
movement in Gaochun probably remains valid, any thorough discussion of the
debate over whether or not to build walls in Gaochun’s administrative center
should consider the financial and manpower conditions in both the county seat
and the wider county, as the Gaochun government had the authority to marshal
the financial and human resources of the whole county, not merely those in the
county seat.
There are a number of other minor errors in the book of the kind that almost
always appear in ambitious projects. For instance, Fei classifies Libu zhigao, a
departmental gazetteer published in 1620 by the ministry of rites in Beijing, as
having been compiled and printed by the Nanjing government. When translating
the second paragraph of the fengsu treatise in Kezuo zhuiyu, she omits the characters of zhongjuan, a crucial term referring to eunuchs in imperial China. Perplexingly, she mentions the two Fujian prefectures of Zhangzhou and Tingzhou (which
is misspelled as Dingzhou) as counties. Occasionally, Fei also reads source material
Reviews 67
less than carefully. As an example, she writes that “[a]ccording to Mingshi (Official
history of the Ming dynasty), Ding’s long-term appointment in Nanjing resulted
from his defying the powerful chief councilor Zhang Juzheng in Beijing” ( p. 280),
but his biography in Mingshi records plainly that Ding Bin incurred Zhang’s hatred
in the early years of his career by refusing to follow blindly the powerful senior
grand secretary and was subsequently forced out of office. Ding’s three-decade
career in Nanjing began in 1591, nine years after Zhang’s death in 1582, and he
remained there until retirement in 1620. Clearly, his lengthy service in the
­southern capital had nothing to do with the long dead Zhang Juzheng.
Despite the reservations mentioned above, Fei’s book overall adopts a convincing approach, provides detailed case studies, and presents its arguments with
clarity. Conversing extremely well with the existing scholarship on the city, urbanization, and urbanism in imperial China, it is undoubtedly a major contribution to
the studies of history of urbanization in imperial China and of Ming Nanjing.
Jun Fang
Jun Fang is an associate professor of history specializing in studies of Yuan-Ming
China at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario.
References
Gu Qiyuan. 1987. Kezuo zhuiyu (Superfluous chats from guests’ seats). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.
Zhang Tingyu et al. 1974. Mingshi (History of the Ming dynasty). Beijing: Zhinghua shuju.
Paul R. Goldin. Confucianism. Ancient Philosophies, 9. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011. viii, 168 pp. Hardcover $65.00,
isbn 978-0-520-26969-9. Paperback $24.95, isbn 978-0-520-26970-5.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Paul R. Goldin’s new introductory textbook is part of the series Ancient Philosophies and, therefore, focuses almost entirely on classical Confucianism, as the
author explains in the introduction. The entire history of the tradition from the
Han through the Qing dynasties occupies six pages in the final chapter. One
wonders why the book was not more accurately titled Classical Confucian Phi­
losophy, especially as a forthcoming book in the series is said to be titled Classical
Islamic Philosophy. Aside from that quibble, this is a very solid introduction that
goes well beyond the standard fare by offering original interpretations of several
topics.
The introduction is called “What Confucianism Is and What Confucianism Is
Not.” The latter category distinguishes Confucianism from topics such as foot
68 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
binding, the basic structure of the family (although not the relationships within
the family), and Chinese society as a whole. Since this is a book about Confucian
philosophy, Goldin correctly focuses on the beliefs of Confucius and his followers,
leaving aside rituals and other activities that could be included under the Confucian umbrella, such as life in Confucian academies. He summarizes the central
core of beliefs as follows:
(i) [H]uman beings are born with the capacity to develop morally; (ii) moral
development begins with moral self-cultivation . . . ; (iii) by perfecting oneself in
this manner, one also contributes to the project of perfecting the world; (iv) there
were people in the past who perfected themselves, and then presided over an
unsurpassably harmonious society — these people are called “sages” (sheng 聖 or
shengren 聖人). Not all Confucians agreed about what moral self-cultivation
entails, but all accepted that we can and must do it, and that it is a task of utmost
urgency. ( pp. 5–6)
The five chapters of the book are on (1) Confucius and his disciples, (2) the Great
Learning and Canon of Filial Piety, (3) Mencius, (4) Xunzi, and (5) everything after
Xunzi. There is also a six-page appendix on “Manhood in the Analects,” which
basically makes the point that the fundamental virtues espoused by Confucius are
not gendered, even though Confucians for more than two thousand years assumed
that they mainly applied to men. The notes and bibliography are quite extensive,
and there is a useful guide to further reading. The only non-Western-language
items in these sections are primary texts. Chinese characters are included in the
text throughout the book.
Goldin considers the first fifteen of the twenty chapters of the Analects to
reflect more or less accurately a coherent philosophy traceable to Confucius ( p. 11).
He rejects the premise of E. Bruce and A. Taeko Brooks that differences in theme
and style of passages of the Analects necessarily imply chronological differences
( p. 124 n. 11). He uses the famous “one thread” passage as an entry point into the
system, but in an original way. In this passage (4:15), Confucius says, “In my Way,
there is one thing with which to string [everything] together,” but he does not say
what that thread is. His senior disciple, Zeng Can, explains to the others, “The Way
of the Master is nothing other than zhong 忠 [conventionally translated as loyalty]
and shu 恕 [reciprocity].” Goldin nicely cuts through the centuries of difficulty
scholars have had explaining this by asking, essentially, why should we take Zeng
Can’s word for it? In another passage, in fact, Confucius himself says that the one
word that can guide one’s practice is shu, and, in fact, it is clear that reciprocity is
more fundamental to his philosophy than zhong. Goldin also deals with another
problematic passage (13:18, on “Upright Gong”) in which Confucius says that
fathers and sons should not report each other to the authorities for theft. The point
here is that filiality (xiao 孝) is the “root of the Way” (1:2), or the basis for public
morality, and to undermine it threatens the whole edifice. There are remaining
questions to be asked, and recent philosophers have discussed these problems
Reviews 69
extensively, but the decision to address such problematic issues in a short introduction is a good one.
The chapter on the Daxue 大學 (Great learning) and Xiaojing 孝經 (translated
here as Canon of filial piety) mostly addresses the latter, especially the chapter on
remonstrance (zheng 爭, translated here as expostulating). This is an important
corrective to the nearly universal view that Confucian filiality means absolute
obedience to parents. In fact, the chapter clearly states that social subordinates at
all levels have the responsibility to point out the errors of their superiors and to
argue forcefully (zheng means to dispute, fight, contend, strive). True filiality, in
other words, implies wanting and helping one’s parent to follow the Way. My only
question regarding this chapter is, why was the Zhongyong 中庸 (Centrality and
Commonality, or The Mean in Practice) not discussed? It is philosophically richer
than the Daxue and just as important to the later tradition.
The discussion of Mencius includes substantial quotations and generally
incisive analyses of key passages (the flood-like qi 氣, Mo Di and Yang Zhu, the
child and the well, King Xuan of Qi and the ox, one exchange with Gaozi, Ox
Mountain, and several others). Goldin defines Mencius’s concept xing 性 (the
nature of a thing) as “the ideal state that an organism should attain in a conducive
environment” ( p. 51). But then he defines Mencius’s concept of ming 命 (destiny)
as “the exalted state that we are expected to attain through our own diligent
labour” ( p. 55). These definitions seem to describe a distinction without a difference. The problem, I think, lies in thinking of ming as anything like destiny or fate.
Goldin acknowledges that “destiny is not the fate that has been predetermined for
us” ( p. 55), but, in my opinion, both words should be abandoned altogether in this
context. Ming in Mencius is something more like givenness, the brute realities of
life that we have no choice about, such as where and to whom we are born and the
fact that we will die. This interpretation is consistent with its usage in tianming
天命, the mandate or decree of heaven, and with the first line of the Zhongyong:
“What is given by Heaven is called the nature” (tianming zhi wei xing 天命之
謂性). It also works with Mencius’s complex argument in 7B.24, where he says,
basically, that there is xing in ming and ming in xing.
The chapter on Xunzi, perhaps surprisingly, is longer than the one on Mencius
(31 and 27 pages, respectively). But Goldin argues cogently that Xunzi was unjustly
shunted aside in the later Confucian tradition, and that he is perhaps “the most
complex philosopher that China has ever produced” ( p. 68), justifying the revival
of interest in him in recent decades. Goldin himself published a book on Xunzi in
1999, so he has much to say on the topic. Here we have ample and incisive discussions of Xunzi on human nature, ritual, heaven, warfare, rectifying names, and the
mind/heart. On Xunzi’s well-known criticism of Mencius’s claim that human
nature is good, Goldin correctly points out that the dispute is not really about the
inherent goodness or badness of human beings, but rather about the meaning of
the word xing. On the substance of the matter, they are in substantial agreement:
70 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
both agree that all humans have the potential to become sages, and that education
and other means of external nurturance are necessary in order to fulfill that
potential. For Mencius that additional nurturance normally requires a benevolent
government that provides the basic necessities of life; for Xunzi it requires the
rituals devised by the sages of the past. (How they became sages is not addressed
by Xunzi — a potentially fatal flaw in his argument.) The reason Xunzi claims that
despite this universal potential, human nature is bad, is that he defines xing as that
which develops spontaneously, without education or external nurturance. For
Mencius, on the other hand, the nature of a thing is that which distinguishes it
from other classes of things (he implies this in saying that a person without the
four beginnings of goodness would not be human). Goldin does not mention this
point in Mencius’s argument, but I think it is crucial.
I would differ with Goldin on the meaning of tian 天 (heaven) for Xunzi. He
says, “Heaven plays a sure but indirect role in determining our fortune or misfortune. Heaven never intercedes directly in human affairs, but human affairs are
certain to succeed or fail according to a timeless pattern that Heaven determined
before human beings existed” ( p. 82). To me, it is abundantly clear in Xunzi’s
tianlun 天論 (Discussion of heaven) that the “constant Way of Heaven” has no
relevance to the success or failure of human affairs, except insofar as it establishes
the limits of human life and activity. Here again the idea of givenness (ming) is
implied, while Goldin seems to have in mind an idea of predetermined destiny.
The final chapter, as mentioned above, rushes through more than two thousand years of Confucianism in six pages, before settling on a brief but excellent
discussion of Confucianism in the twentieth century and beyond. The discussion
of modernity touches on Max Weber, Liang Qichao, Liang Shuming, the 1958
“Manifesto” by five leading New Confucians, and Confucius Institutes. But Han
Confucianism is discussed with no mention of Dong Zhongshu or yin-yang 陰陽
theory; the major Cheng-Zhu figures of the Song are mentioned, but there is
nothing on Wang Yangming (1472–1529) or the kaozheng 考證 (evidential
research) movement. Nevertheless, this book’s basic fairness is demonstrated by
one of Goldin’s concluding points:
Paternalistic governments throughout China’s history have been attracted to
Confucius because they have regarded inculcating deference among the populace
as a Confucian ideal. Were Confucius himself to have discovered how his teaching would be appropriated, he might not have been pleased. ( p. 112)
In addition to the quibble about the title mentioned above, I found Goldin’s use
of exceedingly rare words a bit off-putting. He apparently prefers “meiosis” to
“understatement” ( p. 11), “pleonastic” to “redundant” ( p. 23), “mactated” to “sacrificed” ( p. 61), and “flabellum” to “fan” ( p. 76). I am all for expanding one’s vocabulary, but . . . mactated?
Nevertheless, Confucianism is an engaging and philosophically incisive
introduction by a scholar who is extraordinarily well read in the secondary litera-
Reviews 71
ture, as evidenced by the extensive endnotes. For these reasons, even specialists
who may or may not agree with all his interpretations should benefit by reading it.
With the proviso that the book be understood as an introduction to classical
Confucianism and not the entire tradition, it is most highly recommended.
Joseph A. Adler
Joseph A. Adler is a professor of Asian studies and religious studies at Kenyon College
(Gambier, Ohio), specializing in Song Confucianism.
Jonathan Goldstein. Stephen Girard’s Trade with China, 1787–1824: The
Norms versus the Profits of Trade. Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2011. ix,
141 pp. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 978-0-9836599-7-6. Paperback $35.00,
isbn 978-0-9836599-6-9.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Written by historian Jonathan Goldstein, this monograph examines the involvement from 1784 to 1824 of Stephen Girard (b. 1750–1831) — one of the first American millionaires and philanthropists — in the old China trade, the earliest direct
contact between the United States and China, from 1787 to 1824.
The first American foray into the Asian Pacific in 1784 not only brought North
America into the framework of international exchange in Asia, it also initiated the
rapid rise of the United States as China’s second-largest trading partner by the turn
of the nineteenth century. Traditionally, two interpretative strands — the dependency and modernization models — have shaped the broad contours of scholarly
writing on the early America-China trade. The dependency school contends that
the old China trade — the commercial component of a westward Pacific movement
by the United States — was intrusive and imperialist, with the United States gaining
capital for development at the expense of others. The modernization paradigm, on
the other hand, suggests that American enterprise in China ultimately stimulated
China’s long-term modernization efforts. Combining these perspectives, Goldstein’s work contributes to the growing body of recent scholarship that emphasizes
the complex interactions among competition, profitability, the Chinese way of
conducting commerce, foreign notions of free trade, and the changing business
environment.
The book is divided into five chapters, grounded in comprehensive secondary
and primary sources including the Girard papers, housed at Girard College in
Philadelphia. Chapter 1 contextualizes the old China trade that fueled the new
nation’s push for overseas trading markets as far away as East Asia. Following
72 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
independence, a severe economic depression and Anglo-American rivalry prodded Americans to push their way into world markets. Chapter 2 focuses on Canton
and Philadelphia, the two cities at the epicenter of Chinese and American international trade. In chapter 3, Goldstein suggests that Girard’s entry into Philadelphia’s
China trade was a result of the political, commerical, and industrial revolutions
that reshaped Girard’s home country, France, and much of Western Europe and
the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. Favorable American tariff
policies toward Chinese goods shipped by American entrepreneurs also helped
Girard gain a foothold in the China trade.
Chapter 4 discusses how Girard and his designers overcame technological
challenges and built a special class of ships for the China trade. Among the factors
leading to the competitiveness of Girard’s ships in the China market were meticulous management, trading in opium contraband, exploitation of the three-legged
(U.S.-Europe-China) trade route, the cultivation of working relationships with
reputable Chinese hong merchants, and a sound understanding of the market
forces of supply and demand. Chapter 5 connects the withdrawal of Girard from
the China trade to the Terranova Incident in fall 1821. Francis Terranova, an Italian
sailor on the Baltimore opium ship Emily, was strangled by the Chinese authorities
without a proper trial on suspicion of causing the death of a Chinese woman.
In addition to this case, the author identifies several other factors, such as the
availability of advanced sail- and steam-powered vessels and the risks involved in
dealing in an illegal drug, which also had a significant impact on Girard’s decision
to quit his China business after thirty-four years.
What is less clear in Goldstein’s case study is the actual process whereby
Girard decided to stop sending opium to China and eventually withdrew from the
China market in the early 1820s. It appears to have been largely a practical business
decision — based on a calculation of risks versus earnings — rather than the product of a clash between Chinese economic norms and “Girard’s intent to maximize
profit,” as the author argues ( pp. 85–87). A similar calculation was brought to bear,
for example, when Canton was blockaded by British forces in 1839–1840, and
influential American merchants, such as Robert B. Forbes of Russell and Company, continued to trade with China, making lucrative journeys up and down the
Pearl River.
This minor reservation aside, Goldstein’s book is an important study; it
encourages us to reassess the mechanisms that activated the old China trade as
well as the rapid rise of the United States in the Asian Pacific. As a newly independent country, the United States at the end of the eighteenth century consciously
challenged the European imperial powers in the fiercely contested arena of international trade and succeeded in overhauling the established economic order. Many
American traders and some Chinese hong merchants amassed vast fortunes in a
very short time. In particular, American merchants — Elias Hasket Derby, Stephen
Girard, John Murray Forbes, John P. Cushing, John Jacob Astor, and Thomas
Reviews 73
Handasyd Perkins, to name just a few — left a palpable mark on the U.S. economy,
politics, and foreign relations, although the significance of the China market in
total American exports to the world was minimal, less than 0.5 percent by the end
of the nineteenth century. An in-depth understanding of the role of this important
interest group illuminates the dynamic beginnings of American nationalism in
its rise from a British colonial frontier to a global empire. This historical process
had three distinct components, elements that have received scant attention in
scholarly discussions of early United States–China relations. The first was the
conspicuous anti-British sentiment, an attitude that took many Americans a long
time to discard. The second was America’s conscious pursuit of national greatness
as an independent country. The third component was the entrepreneurial flexibility shown by many American merchants; their ability to work within and around
the cohong system and cooperate with local Chinese helped American traders
succeed as latecomers to the China trade.
Goldstein’s work also points to the other major research gap, that is, the
Chinese side of the story. The enormous potential of the old China trade remained
untapped on the Chinese side. In the late 1830s, the growing disparity between the
Chinese e­ conomy — with a low level of capital accumulation and underdeveloped
domestic industries — and the rapidly industrializing British manufacturing sector
eventually brought down the Canton system. Making full use of the Qing court
archives on the thirteen hongs and trade in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao
should give a powerful boost to English-language scholarship in this fascinating
field.
Dong Wang
Dong Wang is a professorial senior fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen in
Germany. Her latest book is The United States and China: A History from the
Eighteenth Century to the Present.
Xiaolin Guo. State and Ethnicity in China’s Southwest. China Studies, vol. 15.
Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008. ix, 346 pp. Hardcover $149.00,
isbn 978-90-04-16775-9.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
State and Ethnicity in China’s Southwest is an ambitious volume that examines
statecraft and local politics from multiple perspectives dating from the Nanzhao
era (738–902) to the mid-2000s, emphasizing fluidity and pragmatic adaptation of
both those being governed and those attempting to influence their lives. Over the
74 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
centuries discussed in the book, the interplay between the Chinese state, in its
varying incarnations; its regional representatives; and those dwelling in mountainous regions of present-day northwest Yunnan and environs receives explicit
attention. The book reframes discussions of ethnicity to include a more state-­
centered analysis, looking at both ethnic minorities and Han communities, one of
the first volumes to examine state function in this area of China. While not the
only ethnography focusing explicitly on the state in this region (Erik Mueggler’s
The Age of Wild Ghosts [2001] comes to mind,1 as does Thomas Mullaney’s recent
publication Coming to Terms with the Nation [2011]2), this is the first to cast its
focus with equal intensity on historical interactions and contemporary ethnic
politics. Unlike the many single-group ethnographies of ethnicity in Southwest
China, Guo’s work is explicitly comparative, both temporally and geographically.3
The study is at the nexus of political science and anthropology, grounded in
historical anthropology. This leads to both positive outcomes and challenges. The
author’s careful consultation of archival materials, gazetteers, and contemporary
Chinese scholarship offers a strong contribution to understandings of the way
early ethnic policies played out. She repositions ethnicity policy as part of a larger
set of continuous state approaches to the problem of political integration, not an
attempt at Sinicization, regardless of the particular governing authority. While
historians may take issue with this generalization, noting distinctions from one era
and one reign to the next in terms of minority policies, scholars of the southwest
will appreciate the argument in part because it emphasizes the limited knowledge
of, and engagement with, most smaller groups by the central state. This means that
until the twentieth century, government engagements varied less than previously
assumed.
Guo astutely points out that Han identity should be seen not as a stark opposition to ethnic minority identity, as is often assumed, but rather interpreted as
“political power or economic dominance rather than to ethnic membership per
se — it thus included individuals whose standing was perceived by the local community as markedly different from the local majority, irrespective of their ethnic
backgrounds” ( p. 67). By way of example, she describes literate Naxi and Bai,
whose social mobility and power meant that Nu people, another one of the diverse
region’s ethnic groups, took them for Han. Acculturation proceeded unevenly in
the complex circumstances of Yunnan, where in some areas Han or other newcomers assimilated completely, and in others assimilation was prevented by local
endogamy rules, as in the Cold Mountain Yi areas. Guo argues cogently for a
place-based understanding of ethnicity informed as much by ecology and geography as by social structures and superficial ethnic markers.
Case Studies of Mosuo and Han Townships
Guo deserves praise for her detailed analysis of kinship, social structure, and
economy in two areas: the Three River Basin, a fertile area whose history as the site
Reviews 75
of a Ming-era garrison is still evident in its predominately Han ethnic makeup
(an anomaly within an area of ethnic diversity), and the unfortunately titled yet
worthy chapter on “The Land of Women,” home to the group known today as
Mosuo and Mongol. Following these two chapters are portraits of the counties that
today encompass the Three River Basin and part of “The Land of Women,” Yongsheng,
and Ninglang. These benefit from wonderfully candid interviews with government
officials of those counties, whose remarks enliven the discussion of local-regionalnational policies (although the discussion lacks the perspectives of villagers).
The chapters that sketch out kinship and economy in “The Land of Women”
and the Three River Basin reflect some methodological weaknesses of the vast
scope, revealing partial understandings that longer-term fieldwork in a single site
would likely remedy. First, Guo assumes that the current inhabitants are the direct
descendants of the Qiangic peoples of the matrilineal Nü Guo (女国) ( p. 89). This
assumption is problematic because it assumes not the fluidity that she emphasizes
elsewhere, but a fixity in population and essentiality in cultural traits that do not
reflect contemporary anthropological ideas of culture and ethnicity. Second, the
assumption of Nü Guo origins reflects Guo’s uncritical use of certain sources
without evaluating their veracity, a problem found throughout the book. For
example, as evidence for her ethnographic descriptions of Mosuo culture, she
quotes extensively from the admirable yet amateur botanist-explorer-ethnographer
Joseph Rock, whose claims must be carefully assessed for credibility and context.
(His erroneous claim that the same term is used for father and mother’s brother,
and that no term for father exists, is reproduced unquestioningly on p. 137. One
would think that Guo’s own fieldwork in the region would have revealed the term
ada for father.4) Third, transcriptions deriving from Tibetan and Mandarin pronunciations rather than Naru (the Mosuo language) and constant references to
language use and shift to evince ethnic connectedness are problematic. Claims that
Qiangic origins are reinforced by the existence of household guard dogs and the
husbandry of certain animals, such as pigs ( p. 148), are equally problematic. (Are
these not widespread beyond Qiangic populations?)
Finally, Guo is quick to dismiss the term haixiu wenhua (culture of bashfulness), coined by sociologist Zhou Huashan, despite its correspondence to the Naru
concept shudo ( pp. 133–135). Not merely something to tell visiting ethnographers
as a way of conforming to contemporary, externally influenced ideas of sexual
modesty, shudo is a central principle that conceals romantic entanglements and
permits adult siblings to reside together while avoiding talk of relationships.
Apparently unaware of the term shudo, Guo strangely criticizes both the idea and
the coinage of the Chinese-language term haixiu wenhua: “The construction of a
model by way of labeling a superficial phenomenon to embody a system or institution, or even more obscurely, culture, seldom explains anything deeper than the
term itself ” ( p. 134). Taken together, these ethnographic errors and uneven assessment of sources detract from the overall quality of the book.
76 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Similarly, problems exist with Guo’s discussion of Han practices in the Three
River basin. While the ethnography of a historically Han area in northwest Yunnan
makes a strong contribution to the ethnography of a place usually studied for its
ethnic minorities — with particular strength in the discussion of uxorilocal marriage ( pp. 191–192) and of zhaipo, unmarried women who remain in their natal
home and enjoy familial veneration ( pp. 193–197) — it seems unnecessary to
­establish that Han ritual and marital practices in this part of China differ from
those in southeastern China. Perhaps at the time of the author’s 1992 dissertation
fieldwork, this point needed to be made, but the recent wave of scholarship on
the Han (e.g., Critical Han Studies)5 and the diversity of ethnographies of Han
family forms should make this point less important. For any readers who assume
the national unity and homogeneity of the Han ethnic group, the chapter will
offer an important counterexample. On the other hand, it will reinforce the
­perspective of those who understand the Han group to be a constructed identity.
To what degree local customs bear the influence of the gender-flexible systems
prevalent near the Three River Basin Han (who often intermarry) is open to
interpretation.
Ethnicity and Governance at the County Level
The richness of the book lies in its nuanced portrait of governance in a multi­
ethnic region, especially in light of the sudden fixity that Communist admini­
strative strategies gave. Normally fluid ethnic borders, as with mobile Yi
populations who had recently migrated from the Greater Cold Mountains in
Sichuan, were frozen by attempts in the 1950s at consolidating power in the
­turbulent Yunnan-Sichuan-Tibet border regions. Guo recounts how territories
historically controlled by Mosuo native chieftains were administratively relinquished to Yi with the goal of placating this later, recently rebelling group. Thus
emerged an autonomous Yi county (Ninglang) and a continuum of classifications:
Tibetan-Pumi-Mosuo and Mosuo-Naxi-Mongol, depending on the circumstances
and the political imperatives ( pp. 51–54, 214–216). Borders were carefully drawn
and redrawn to minimize potential conflict and opposition to the state. (Despite
the population size, an autonomous Yi region was never established, something
Guo attributes to its lack of national representation as well as its rebellious potential [p. 46].)
Although Guo recounts how kinship obligations influence government post
procurement and intragovernmental relationships, she understates the effect of
ethnicity on local government administration ( p. 234). After discussing the prevalence of Yi raids in basin villages to capture children, crops, and livestock during
the late Qing and Republican eras (the captured children were then sold as slaves
and seldom recovered by their natal families), Guo states simply, “This experience
is at the core of Han-Yi community relations on the Yunnan frontier” ( p. 166).
Other communities also felt the effects of Yi raids, and this not-so-distant memory
Reviews 77
continues to color ethnic politics in northwest Yunnan, particularly in the multiethnic autonomous Yi county of Ninglang. Resentments over Yi bias in funding
allocations and work prioritization are rampant in present-day Ninglang, as the
author of this review has observed firsthand.
The comparisons of contemporary Ninglang and Yongsheng Counties are
particularly interesting when Guo discusses their respective approaches to poverty
alleviation and what she terms “administered development” ( pp. 93–94). Her
fascinating analysis explains why, amid changing fiscal policies, the revenues of
the current county-level governments in the 1990s and early 2000s have been so
much lower than the operating budgets supplied to them by the state, and why that
discrepancy is growing rather than shrinking. First, Ninglang County’s status as an
autonomous Yi county entitled it to certain preferential policies and economic
support that the undesignated, Han-dominated Yongsheng County did not receive.
Second, after the forestry boom in northwest Yunnan was definitively halted as a
source of Ninglang county government revenue following the post-Yangtze-flooding
logging ban in 1998, the central government responded by supplementing the
Ninglang County budget with compensatory subsidies. Added to their subsidies as
a nationally designated poverty-stricken area, which increased further after the
develop-the-west campaigns began in 2001, this meant the county government
depended almost exclusively on national financing. Although the number of
poverty-stricken individuals in the county did not diminish, the county government benefited: by 2001, Ninglang County boasted twice the number of official
vehicles as Yongsheng ( p. 251). Guo, therefore, writes, “Development in Ninglang
has relied not on favorable economic conditions but rather on a lack of such
conditions” ( p. 249).
Mindful of the political possibilities of poverty, county leaders in Yongsheng,
once among the most productive agricultural territories in Yunnan during an
earlier era but with significant inequality between basin- and mountain-dwelling
territories, lobbied for the lucrative designation of poverty-stricken county and
attained it in 2001 ( pp. 308–309). Their previous attempts at cash-crop coercion
through forcing villagers to cultivate tobacco had come to a halt when preferential
fiscal policies ended in the 1990s, limiting their ability to retain revenues and
collect fees ( p. 305). Conversely, Guo quotes local administrators who explain,
“The name of poverty-stricken county may be awful sounding, but the hat really
keeps one warm” (贫困帽很难听，带着很温暖) ( p. 101).
Guo leaves analysis of the implications for local government subservience to
national political projects in this dependent economic relationship as a task for
future scholars. In general, many theoretical implications of her detailed empirical
research remain to be engaged. The meticulous accounts of labor, economy,
­ethnicity, ecology, and policy can be considered a treat for scholars of this rapidly
changing region, but the missed opportunities for trenchant analysis stand out.
Despite its flaws, Guo’s text offers a substantial contribution to the scholarship of
78 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
southwest Chinese statecraft and ethnicity and an excellent baseline for future and
comparative research.
Tami Blumenfield
Tami Blumenfield is the James B. Duke Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at
Furman University, specializing in studies of ethnicity, representation, and cultural
heritage politics in Southwest China. She is the co-editor, with Helaine Silverman, of
Cultural Heritage Politics in China.
Notes
1. Erik Mueggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
2. Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern
China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
3. Two works missing from Guo’s discussion are Stevan Harrell’s Ways of Being Ethnic in
Southwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001) and Katherine Palmer Kaup’s
Creating the Zhuang: Ethnic Politics in China (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000).
Guo’s book takes a different and more comprehensive approach temporally, ranging over some
2,000 years, while Harrell and Kaup are concerned with the range of ethnic expression and the
role of the state in redefining ethnic identity primarily in the twentieth century, but the significant overlap of their topics nonetheless deserves consideration in the present work.
4. For a critique of this terminological absence in Na scholarship, see Tami Blumenfield
Kedar, “Scenes from Yongning: Media Creation in China’s Na Villages” (PhD diss., University of
Washington, 2010).
5. Thomas S. Mullaney, James Patrick Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Armand Vanden
Bussche, eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Yufan Hao and Bill K. P. Chou, editors. China’s Policies on Its Borderlands
and the International Implications. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing,
2011. 296 pp. Hardcover $95.00, isbn 978-981-4287-66-1.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Of all the defining principles in Chinese foreign policy, none has been more
central or more fixed in Beijing’s priorities than the One China policy. Conducting
any form of exchange with China — diplomatic, educational, commercial, bilateral,
multilateral — requires routine compliance with the idea that there is only one
China and only one government of China. Put at its essence — China does not
practice polyarchy. During the socialist era, this doctrine of grand unity was more
or less tenable — it was possible to see China as a single political and social space,
Reviews 79
achieving increased integrity. Today, however, the idea that China represents a
single and common political and social space looks like stark contradiction of the
facts — there are now many political spaces in China, and their diversity and
mobility continue to increase. Of course, the social, economic, technological,
and cultural modernization that is driving political differentiation across China
has also made the Chinese state stronger and richer. According to World Bank
estimates, the Chinese central government expenditure stood at us$791 billion
in 2010, ranked third in the world after the United States and Japan. This means
that the Chinese government has more resources with which to bind Chinese
political spaces together and more resources to sanction those within China or
internationally who might be thinking of walking away from the One China
principle. This volume, edited by Yufan Hao and Bill K. P. Chou, advances
into this territory of one China or many Chinas. It takes as its focus China’s
­borderlands — the interior and maritime frontiers (Bianjiang, Haijiang) that
the People’s Republic of China (PRC) inherited from the collapsed imperial
­structure — and examines the dynamics between political, economic, and social
differentiation in the borderlands; the international interactions in and across
the borderlands; and the way the central government policy negotiates around
internal and external priorities. Of course, the kinds of cases involved may seem
to have limited commonalities precisely because of the variety of historical forces
that have pushed and pulled at China’s frontiers in the past. However, this is one
of the main reasons for studying China’s borderlands: frontier diversity is a good
indicator of the incomplete and variable nature of Chinese statehood in which
building statehood and building frontiers have interacted in the past and continue
to do so today.
The chapter topics in this volume, therefore, tend to replicate the diverse and
mobile nature of the borderlands. These include international implications of the
Tibet and Xinjiang questions (Colin Mackerras); China’s diplomacy in the
­Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO; Weiqing Song); China’s relations with
Central Asia (Gudrun Wacker); Hulunbier, border city of Inner Mongolia (T. J.
Cheng); origins of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku dispute (Edwin Pak-wah Leung);
­Northeast maritime disputes between China, Japan, and Korea (Quansheng Zhao);
PRC military strategy for Taiwan (You Ji); language policy in post-handover Hong
Kong (Jean-Francois Dupré); Macao’s autonomy and Beijing’s borderlands policies
(Bill K. P. Chou); and China’s Myanmar Policy (Zhao Hong). Rather like the
borderlands themselves, these chapter topics seem to be heading off into different
directions; and some strong determination might be required to hold them
together. Unfortunately, the volume does not really make any attempt at an overarching perspective, such as might be achieved by setting a shared conceptual
framework for the contributors or a chapter that integrates important themes or
conclusions. As a result, readers are rather left to themselves to work out what
points of complementarity there might be between the different cases. I will put
80 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
the chapters into three categories for review purposes: Inner Asian frontiers;
maritime frontiers, excluding Greater China; and Greater China.
The diversity of state construction/frontier construction in China is most
apparent in Inner Asia — the 16,800-kilometer arc that runs from the ChineseDemocratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)-Russian border to the ChineseIndian-Myanmar border. Most of this frontier was closed for a quarter century
before the mid-1980s, and the five essays that discuss this section of borderland
point toward some common problems with the new openness. Cheng’s essay
considers the administrative changes that China has taken in the frontier city of
Hulunbeier in Inner Mongolia in order to facilitate opening toward Mongolia and
the Russian Far East. This macrocity of 253,000 square kilometers is larger than
Shandong and Jiangsu combined and was administratively redrawn from several
smaller units because the frontier regions were viewed as bottlenecks ( p. 95) for
opening and development rather than conduits. The new openness has transformed the development prospects of Hu Meng (league) but has brought a number
of social stresses with it, notably a dysfunctional real estate market that Cheng
analyzes. Though it concerns a borderland at the opposite, southern frontier to
Inner Mongolia, H. Zhao’s paper is also about Inner Asia. Yunnan has always
been very important to China’s strategy for Myanmar and continues to provide
half of all PRC trade with the country. Zhao reports that the activities of China’s
local-level companies have been the source of many of Beijing’s problems in
managing its Myanmar relationship since the activities of these companies — not least, an unregulated resource extraction — have triggered controversies and
backlashes. Zhao details Beijing’s programs of aid, investment, and logistical
development in Myanmar but disputes that this represents expansionism. B
­ eijing
is behaving strategically, but this is primarily “economics in command” by means
of a mercantilist network extending into Southeast Asia. In any case, Zhao notes
that China’s influence is in relative decline as Naypyidaw thinks about internal
reform and international opening and other states seek to take advantage of this.
The essays by Song and Wacker turn to the northwestern frontier with Central
Asia, Wacker examining regional politics and Song the dynamics of SCO. Wacker
points out that China’s strategy is predominantly state-centric and, thus, directed
toward sustaining the status quo. China’s elite model has prioritized political
stability and economic development on both sides of the frontier. In security
relations, Beijing has largely been successful in persuading the elites of Central
Asia that maintaining stability on the frontier means repressing anti-Chinese
activities in their territories. Wacker outlines the scope of security coordination
between Beijing and the other SCO members but concludes, as others have done,
that this cooperation is broad but shallow:
It remains unclear how deep concrete cooperation and exchange of information
gathered by the security services really goes. Judging from experiences in other
parts of the world, such exchanges of sensitive information are not easy to bring
Reviews 81
about. And in light of persistent mistrust not only between China and Russia, but
also between the Central Asian states, one can doubt that in-depth cooperation is
really taking place ( p. 75).
Wacker thinks that SCO has a credibility gap; therefore, China has pushed for roles
for its favored multilateral group for Inner Asia, but it is not clear these have been,
or can be, fulfilled. Song presents a more positive prospect for SCO, based on its
capacity to deliver regional leadership for China, which he examines by means of
Oran Young’s three-part typology of structural, entrepreneurial, and intellectual
leadership. Song concludes that the new politics of Central Asia provides China
with a number of opportunities to develop leadership skills in these areas. China
seems to face two problems, however. First, Inner Asia is now open to the structural, entrepreneurial, and intellectual power of a number of states, including the
United States, Russia, and maybe even India and the European Union. China has
progressed quickly, but this was from a very low base, and how China’s power has
shifted not absolutely, but relative to others, is more difficult to determine, as Song
admits ( p. 64). Second, China may be in an intellectual leadership bind: Song says
China is a “critical state” in the “process of authoritarian norm promotion” in the
region ( p. 62). But what happens if authoritarian norms fail: is SCO open to
democratizing states?
The final paper on Inner Asia, by Mackerras, considers the international
dimensions of the disturbances in Tibetan and Uyghur regions in 2008 and 2009.
Mackerras examines the impact on China’s relations with the United States,
Europe, India, and Turkey arising from these events. He concludes that China is
now too powerful for other states to risk their relationship with Beijing by appearing to support Tibetan or Uyghur leaderships overseas. I think this is true, but it
does ignore the role of international public opinion. Beijing may be persuading
international leadership to keep to its line on national minority regions, but is it
winning over global public opinion?
Turning to the two papers by Leung and Q. Zhao on the northeastern maritime frontiers, we find two very compelling portraits of international change.
Leung goes back to the origins of the modern international politics in East Asia in
the 1870s when Japan employed the revolutionary idea of a nation-state system to
challenge and push back China’s tribute-state system. China considered the Liuqiu
islands (Japanese: Ryukyu) a tributary entity not connected to Japan. As Japan
expanded down the island chain toward Taiwan, it forced China not only to
concede territory from the tributary periphery but called in to question China’s
mode of international relations. Much of Leung’s careful historical examination
focuses on the role of China’s chief negotiator, Li Hongzhang, still considered by
many in China to be a quisling because of his willingness to seek accommodations
with Japan and Russia in the hope of checking Western imperialism. Leung makes
clear that Li’s concession of Liuqiu was not solely a geopolitical calculation.
Because of rising doubts as to the sustainability of China’s mode of external
82 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
r­ elations, “Li Hongzhang began to seriously question China’s moral obligation of
defending the Tributary State System. It appears that the ideological structure of
the Chinese Confucian universal empire had begun to crumble” ( p. 131). Leung’s is
a fine essay but is seriously marred by a production failure: the endnotes are
present but there are no number tags in the text. It is hard to see how proofreaders
failed to notice this omission. Q. Zhao’s chapter takes us to the five modern-day
territorial disputes on the northeast maritime area: three between China and
Japan, one between China and South Korea, and one between South Korea and
Japan. Zhao gives us an account of each of these disputes and their political,
economic, and military significance in shaping international relations in Northeast
Asia. However, his main purpose is to discuss China’s changing approaches to
managing regional disputes. He posits three Chinese approaches to dispute settlement: a history-embedded approach that locates regional disputes in a retrospective view shaped by imperialism, an interest-driven approach shaped by the state’s
renewed focus on fulfilling its expanding interest horizon, and a comanagement
approach that emphasizes the potential for arbitration between dispute parties.
Zhao says that Beijing’s interest in comanagement has increased visibly in the last
ten years, and in this lies a possible route to resolution of the maritime frontier
disputes. However, he also admits that the history-based and interest-driven
approaches are still evident. Thus, the three approaches are likely to be in contention with each other, depending on a variety of internal and international pressures. Zhao does make the highly pertinent point that settling the land frontiers
has progressed much more smoothly than the maritime frontiers and there are
interesting research questions to be explored as to why this is.
On the final borderland of Greater China, we have two essays by Dupré and
Chou on the evolving nature of cultural and administrative autonomy, respectively,
under “one country, two systems.” Dupré’s essay is a closely argued examination of
how Hong Kong’s multilingualism embodies political-cultural identities under
“one country, two systems” but is employed by various social forces to pursue
identity outcomes. The easiest way to convey the discussion in what is a complex
case study is to state the research objectives. Do the conventions of European
experience that language rationalization (homogenization) and modernist nationbuilding are mutually constitutive apply in China’s borderlands? What do changes
to language use and language regime operation in Hong Kong since handover tell
us about Hong Kong’s shifting identity in the politico-linguistic frontier of “one
country, two systems”? Finally, Dupré asserts that long-term language outcomes
will be determined not only by political identity developments under quasi autonomy but also “the linguistic coordination of diverse segments of Hong Kong
society” ( p. 201). Chou’s essay is also about the parameters of autonomy under
“one country, two systems,” in this case local administrative autonomy in Macao.
Chou criticizes a dichotomous view of center-local relations in liberal democracies and China’s Party-state system, pointing out that local authorities have con-
Reviews 83
strained autonomy in both types of government. Instead, he adopts the concepts
of initiative and immunity to indicate degrees of autonomy, to suggest that Macao
has a high degree of initiative capacity, albeit within a system that allows it little
or no immunity to sanctions from the center. This allows Chou to assert a general
model of Beijing’s governance in the borderlands: powers of initiative will be
increased where there are no attempts to establish immunity to Beijing’s sanctions, but powers of initiative will be restricted or abolished where Beijing believes
that localities are trying to assert a right to immunity ( pp. 244–245). This explains
why Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia cannot have OCTS: it is not just that
the historical construction of the Inner Asian frontier is different than Greater
China, but that Beijing sees appeals for increased rights of initiative in these
regions to be a veil for ambitions to create immunity from its authority. At first
sight, this model of governance may not seem to have much relevance to Taiwan,
which is usually treated as a unique case in the statehood/ frontier politics of
China, but You’s essay does allow for some connections. You’s main thesis is that
Beijing has abandoned “warisation” of the Taiwan question. The new force posture
toward the Taiwan Strait is a military-political deterrent against attempts to assert
de jure independence and would be deployed only if that red line was crossed.
The “de-warisation” (qu zhanzhenghua, p. 183) strategy that has risen to prominence under Hu Jintao privileges instead all mechanisms of peaceful assimilation,
but especially mutually embedded economics. Consequently, Beijing has developed a position of strategic ambiguity in two aspects. On Taiwan’s status, ambiguity has been achieved by relaxing the meaning of One China, which in the past
could only mean one state, one province. Now it means China and Taiwan under
one roof, but with the construction of the roof open to negotiation. The second
aspect of ambiguity is the timetable for completion of this construction. If
­previously Beijing felt that a timetable would have to be imposed, it now accepts
that the completion date is less significant than that construction of the new
relationship is advancing. You’s excellent analysis proceeds from this discussion
to indicate how the success of the de-warisation strategy on the Strait has allowed
the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to shift focus and effort to tasks and regions
elsewhere.
The connection between Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and perhaps other
borderlands, can, therefore, be evaluated under the notion of horizontal corporatism. The Party-state is often portrayed as corporatist but usually in the conventional sense of a hierarchical state-society relationship in which the central
authority incorporates social forces to inhibit movements toward polyarchy.
However, in the borderlands, corporatism has to function horizontally in lieu of
formal constitutionalism. The center is happy to permit initiatives in the borderlands, especially when they serve its own binding objectives — economic development as a bridge to state building. The coercive capacity of the center is most
concerned with neutralizing attempts to decorporate: to assert autonomy from its
84 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
authority. This cycle of incorporation and coercive pacification on the frontier then
translates into certain core aspects of strategy beyond the frontier.
This is, therefore, a useful volume that raises many issues for further research.
It has two weaknesses perhaps. More could have been done to develop overarching
perspectives on the politics of the borderlands, although given the kaleidoscopic
nature of the issues involved, one can readily accept that this is a large and complex task. Second, and in contrast to most edited volumes that seem to take a long
time to publish, this volume has rather hurriedly been brought to print, and this
shows in a number of weaknesses, notably the absent endnote numbers for Leung’s
chapter. These limitations apart, this volume provides good scholarship in a
number of important case studies and does us the service of indicating the need
for a larger research program on what might be termed modern borderland
studies of China in a comparative and international context. Given the borderlands significance in both framing change to Chinese statehood inwardly and
shaping significant components of outward strategy, this endeavor should be a
major research effort.
David Kerr
David Kerr is lecturer in the international relations of China and director of the
Center for Contemporary Chinese Studies at Durham University, United Kingdom.
Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, editors. Mao’s Invisible Hand:
The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 320 pp. Paperback $24.95,
isbn 978-0-674-06063-0.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the political system it established — together we refer to them as the Party-state — have so far avoided the fate of many
of the former socialist regimes. The Party-state has not only generated rapid
economic growth, which itself stands out in economic history, but also maintained firm political control over China. Many scholars have sought to explain its
puzzling vigor and widely attributed it to well-managed decentralization and the
Party-state’s resilience that is situated in formal and informal institutions. This
edited volume is more ambitious. It attempts to search for the roots of the successful decentralization and the Party-state’s resilience, which it finds in the CCP’s
revolutionary heritage ( p. 7). In a range of policy areas, the nine authors of this
Reviews 85
book trace specific linkages between revolutionary precedents and contemporary
practices.
The introduction, written by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry,
­analyzes the CCP’s “guerrilla-style policy-making” that rests on fluid institutional
arrangements and creative adaptations to new economic changes and uncertainty
( p. 7). It lays the conceptual frame for the volume and is followed by two chapters
concerning methodologies.
The second chapter, by Perry, studies continuities in contemporary CCP’s
use of mass campaigns in politics. Tracing precedents of today’s Constructing
a New Socialist Countryside program back to the Republican era’s rural reconstruction programs and Mao’s massive rural campaigns from the 1950s to 1970s,
Perry discovers not only similar agendas, but also similarities in techniques
used in carrying out the programs. She argues that the post-Mao government
has actively learned from revolutionary practices and modified past mass
­campaigns into “managed campaigns” ( p. 49). Despite avoidance of the term
“campaign,” Maoist rhetoric and practice permeate the contemporary initiatives
( p. 39).
Sebastian Heilmann’s following chapter is crucial as well. It examines the
“experimentation under hierarchy” method ( p. 88), which Heilmann regards as the
key to understanding China’s policy making today. This method derived from the
experiments of “proceeding from point to surface” ( p. 62), which the CCP devised
in the 1920s, refined in the 1930s, officially approved in Yan’an, and redefined in the
1940s and early 1950s. Heilmann is not blind to the non-Communist sources of
policy experimentation during the Republican era, but to him what distinguished
the CCP was its control of the overall experimental process. Heilmann’s insight
also lies in his assertion that this seemingly bottom-up methodology could be
coercive and could be applied as a top-down process, as demonstrated by the Great
Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I hope Heilmann can elaborate more
on this subtle dialectic nature.
The above conceptual frame works nicely with the more focused contributions
of scholars on health care, social regulation, legal reform, media control, public
opinion, subcounty governance, and central-local relations. Wang Shaoguang’s
chapter addresses the issue of rural health care. Wang illustrates well the zigzag
course of the post-Mao Chinese government’s search for good health care programs to cover the countryside. He contends that the cooperative medical system
that emerged from 1955 to 1978 served as the prototype for the new models of
basic health insurance today. Giving much attention to the similarities, Wang
overlooks some significant differences. For example, the cooperative medical
system under Mao was essentially part of rural collective institutions; it received
little financial support from the state. While now the state finances the new systems substantially, and likely it has drawn inspiration from abroad, not simply
from the past.
86 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Nara Dillon explores the continuity in the CCP’s regulating voluntary associations and nonprofit groups from Mao’s era to the post-Mao period. She notes that,
in the last few years, the Chinese Communist government tended to employ more
quasi-Maoist methods of regulating NGOs than in the immediate post-Mao years.
Dillon rejects the common assumption that voluntary associations are destined to
demand autonomy from the state and open the door for a democratic civil society.
Instead, she contends that, in China, NGOs commonly seek state patrons ( p. 158).
She attributes much of the phenomena to China’s failures in transitioning to
legalization. Benjamin Liebman then turns to the topic of legal reform and
­provides an unconventional approach for understanding law reform in post-Mao
China: law reform has facilitated, rather than limited, the implementation of state
policies ( p. 167), which is a feature that can be traced back to the revolutionary
period and the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Liebman also
observes that in recent years the PRC has returned more to its revolutionary
methods rather than embracing international norms. Yuezhi Zhao, whose chapter
studies how the CCP continues to rearticulate its revolutionary legacies in the
media, especially in cyberspace, echoes this observation. He notes that in recent
years, the CCP has strengthened its propaganda management and consciously
used the Internet as the unofficial forum for expressing socialist ideas and defending the CCP’s revolutionary legacies.
Patricia Thornton deals with the CCP’s efforts to handle “public opinion”
and uses her case study to discuss the nature of the CCP’s “mass line” ( p. 239).
Following Lenin’s writings, the CCP, from its inception, has constantly tried to
mold Chinese mass spontaneity and shape popular will through the “mass line”
( p. 238). Thornton, however, unlike most other contributors, notes the stark
difference between Mao’s era and post-Mao reform in the Party’s approach to
directing the mass line. In Mao’s era, the Communists mainly relied on manu­
facturing public opinion, which in nature was what the Party did “to the masses,”
while the post-Mao Chinese Party-state has increasingly adopted the practice of
surveying ­Chinese public opinion, which is more inclined toward what came
“from the masses” ( p. 246). Thornton considers the post-Mao Chinese Party-state’s
resolve to depoliticize Chinese society as the key to its adaptive authoritarianism
( p. 259), a conclusion with which some other contributors may disagree.
The last two chapters focus on the Party-state itself. Joseph Fewsmith explores
one of the most imminent challenges the Chinese government has faced: subcounty governance. A relationship rooted in China’s imperial past and then consolidated during the revolutionary era, Chinese local officials became responsible
to higher authorities rather than to local citizens. Post-Mao reformers attempted
to build a state structure responsive to its local residents by incorporating local
public interests, but they largely failed. Thus, today grassroots officials are essentially unaccountable to the people they govern, which paves the way for abuses of
power. Jae Ho Chung examines China’s central-local dynamics, looking into the
Reviews 87
influences of both imperial and revolutionary governance practices. From a macro
perspective, he discusses the balance between the revolutionary legacy of “implementing according to local conditions” and the perceptual and institutional elements that have enabled Beijing to rein in local assertiveness ( p. 303). I long for
some examples of concrete mechanisms of governance.
This volume avoids categorizing China’s regime with conventional political
science models, such as democracy or dictatorship; it does not seek to condemn or
to celebrate the reform record of the PRC, but to understand it ( p. 5). This volume
has achieved this goal to a remarkable degree and inspires us to take a fresh look at
the reasons and policy mechanisms behind the staying power of Communist Party
rule ( p. 9). Nonetheless, I do have one reservation about the frequently referenced
revolutionary legacies. Revolutionary legacies were complex and multifaceted,
based on different periods ranging from guerrilla wars in the 1920s and 1930s, the
Yan’an way in the 1940s, and CCP’s turbulent governance of China until Mao’s
decease. Moreover, these revolutionary legacies are subject to differing and selective interpretations; thus I might have hoped contributors could specify and
differentiate them. At the same time, as much has been said about the CCP’s
superb capacity to adapt during the Communist revolution, I cannot help but ask,
What is the root cause of the CCP’s strength in this area? If we dig deeper into
China’s imperial past, power had been vested in the personal system with a long
centrifugal tradition. So how had imperial legacies offered a basis for the CCP’s
abilities to adapt?
As an edited volume, all the chapters are exceptionally coherent and take
readers deep into a rich set of provocative arguments and new perspectives. It is a
must-read for scholars interested in exploring China’s dynamics today.
Xiaojia Hou
Xiaojia Hou is an assistant professor of history, specializing in modern Chinese
history, at the University of Colorado Denver.
You-tien Hsing. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and
Property in China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xiv, 278 pp.
© 2013 by University
Hardcover $80.00, isbn 978-0-19-956804-8.
of Hawai‘i Press
In the last two decades, China has moved rapidly to reach a level of urbanization
that, by various estimates, reached 50 percent by the end of 2010. This figure,
88 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
which is often used as a threshold for defining an urbanized society, is subject to
much debate because of the methods adopted in Chinese statistical systems of data
definition and collection, a fact that Chan Kam Wing (1994, 2007) has been pointing out for almost twenty years. While his revisions would suggest slightly lower
estimates of the urban population of China, they make little difference in the fact
that China has experienced one of the most rapid urban transformations in the
history of the world over the last forty years of the post-reform period. Furthermore, this transformation has involved an unprecedented increase in the population being added to urban areas. UN estimates suggest that China’s urban
population will continue to grow, reaching a level of 75 percent by 2050 with an
increase of more than 400 million people in the next forty years.
It is not surprising that this great urban transformation has attracted the
attention of policy makers and researchers from both within and outside of China.
In an era of global economic volatility, environmental challenges, and social
transformation, the level of success that China achieves in responding to these
urbanization challenges is important not only to China but also to the world at
large, particularly the other developing countries of Africa and Asia where similar
processes of rapid urban transformation are occurring. The idea that the Chinese
developmental experience may offer a model for other developing countries is, of
course, very relevant to the Anglo-European concept of the Beijing Consensus to
which China, publicly at least, has been rather cool. However, the announcement
at the 2012 meeting of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa)
leaders that discussed the establishment of a BRICS Development Bank that
would fund projects in developing nations suggests that the ideas has some
validity.
This is the broader context in which Hsing’s valuable book is situated. In this
book, the author focuses on trying to provide the answer to two main questions:
“[F]irst, how does the state and society shape and become shaped by the urban
transformation in post-Mao China?” and, “[S]econd, how does space in the form
of territoriality play a role in these contested processes?” ( p. 23).
In order to answer these questions, Hsing makes the persuasive argument that
“land has moved to the center of local politics in post-Mao China. It now shapes
the restructuring of Chinese state power and radically impacts state-society relations” ( p. 5). Central to this process is the manner in which land has become
increasingly commodified since 1988 while not changing the basic constitutional
provision of the state ownership of land. This has encouraged local governments to
use land-centered accumulation and the rents from this leased land as a key
strategy in local state building. It is further argued that the consequences of these
processes are to reconfigure “relationships among the local state, the market and
society” ( p. 6) that are largely “the result of the distributional consequences of
this land accumulation that trigger challenges to the process as the local state’s
occupation and domination of territory are hotly contested” ( p. 8). This assumes
Reviews 89
various forms of resistance in different zones within the expanding urban territory that is the consequence of the urbanization process. Often this process is
portrayed as a top-down, linear-driven process from national to local levels,
sometimes called “state-led urbanization.” This is perhaps best represented by
the idea that various administrative scales from national to local levels make up
a form of embedded hierarchy, in which the various administrative scales are
nested within national and subnational hierarchies. This facilitates more effective
relationships at the territorial level of these jurisdictional hierarchies. Hsing
recognizes the importance of this conception in the discussion of the functional
(tiao) and ­territorial (kuai) conflicts over the accumulation of land in the core
cities. While it is not always clear in the entrepreneurial bureaucratism of the
Chinese urban revolution, the analysis suggests that the process is far more
­dialectical than top-down, dominated by the central-state vision of a modern
China. Quite j­ustifiably, Hsing is skeptical of this central state-led thesis and
argues for a ­“bottom-up approach to understanding territory and to capture
the spatial d
­ ynamics of the distributional politics of land” ( p. 6) in which “the
local state plays a more active role than merely being an agent of the central state”
( p. 8). As such, Hsing’s book offers an important corrective to the top-down,
state-led urbanization thesis. Although, in my judgment, the author might have
paid more attention to the fact that there is generally more ongoing synergy
between the central-state project of modernizing China and the implementation
of this civic urban territoriality at the local-state level (see McGee et al. 2007,
chapter 4). There is also a potential for ongoing dissonance between the centralstate, province, and local governments over environmental, land use, and social
programs that have been initiated at the central-state level in which the focus
on land and accumulation is not really addressed in this book. An example of
this dissonance is the loss of agricultural land and its implications for food
security.
The major part of the book is devoted to the exploration of the themes of land
accumulation and resistance in three main research sites: the metropolitan areas
of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou; and Chengdu, Changsha, and Zhengzhou,
three metropolises located in inland China that are experiencing rapid rates of
urban increase. These are defined on the basis of Junde Liu’ s (2004) definition of
“jurisdictional economy,” which emphasizes both the importance “of jurisdictional
boundaries in the organization of local economy and polity” and the manner in
which “jurisdictional economy” shapes the configuration of the “politics of accumulation and legitimation in the place” ( p. 12). Hsing identifies three major zones
within these larger metropolitan region; each is identified by a distinctive form of
“space-power relationship” ( p. 10) that reflects the different historical, economic,
and social contexts of these zones. These zones are (1) the core city of the metropolitan region, (2) the urban fringe, and (3) the rural fringe. This formulation leads
to a narrower definition of urban space that had been recognized as having much
90 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
greater territorial extent in Zhou Yixing’s earlier work on the Chinese extended
metropolitan regions (Zhou 1991, pp. 89–111; McGee et al. 2007, chapter 1). This
focus on a jurisdictional definition is undoubtedly legitimate, given the conceptual arguments on which the work is based. However, it means that less attention is paid to the role that other components of the urbanization process — such as transportation, economic specialization, and foreign investment — play
in the creation of functionally integrated metropolitan regions. These will
present major challenges to sustainability in the next phase of the urban
transformation.
The majority of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of the diverse ways
in which the project of local land accumulation has occurred within each of these
zones. It includes the analysis of these processes in core cities that involves the
efforts of municipal governments and the socialist land managers whose aim is to
restructure and renew the core city. At the same time, this process produces
ongoing resistance; existing housing is leveled and city residents are relocated with
what many consider minimal compensation. Hsing gives rich ethnographic
descriptions of this process. A second zone is the urban fringe, where urban
expansion is moving into previously rural areas that have often been annexed to
the core municipality. Here the competition is largely between “urban governments at the municipal and district levels and rural governments at the township
and village levels” ( p. 93) over control of rural land, which often leads to the
displacement of rural populations. However, in some cases, villages are able to use
their collective power to impede government plans and use their land as the basis
for developing their own accumulations strategies. These are strategies of local
accumulation that, following Oi (1992), Hsing recognizes as a form of village
corporatism. This process is subtlety analyzed using examples of villages in the city
(chengzhongcun) from Guangzhou and Beijing. Finally, in chapters 6 and 7, the
author analyzes the process of land accumulation on the rural fringe in which
township governments play an important role in centralizing developments on
land that they control in or around towns. These actions encourage the relocation
and deterritorialization of peasants from surrounding rural areas which generate
protests by the local populace.
Much of the power of this book stems from the author’s extensive fieldwork:
interviews with various actors, such as government officials and people engaged
in resisting, adapting, and sometimes capitulating to the processes of land accumulation. Hsing also uses an extensive range of Chinese sources to document
these empirical chapters. The result provides rich empirical evidence that supports
the conceptual framework of the book and adds another dimension to other
studies of the process, largely dominated by geographers from within and outside
China, that is available in the work of Chan (1994); Yeung and Hu (1992); Ma and
Wu (2005); Wu, Xu, and Yeh (2007); McGee et al. (2007); and Lin (2010). Hsing’s
book is an important contribution to the growing literature on the urbanization
Reviews 91
process in China and will prove an invaluable aid to the understanding of the
human dimensions of the urban revolution now engulfing China.
Terry G. McGee
Terry G. McGee is a professor emeritus of Asian research at the University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He has been engaged in research focusing on
urbanization in East and Southeast Asia for the last fifty years. His most recent book
(jointly written with Lin, Wang, Marton, and Wu) is China’s Urban Space:
Development under Market Socialism.
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Liu, J. 2004. “Zhongguo zhuanxingqi tuxian de “xingzhenqu jingji” xiangxiang fenxi” (An
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and T. G. McGee. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
92 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Katrien Jacobs. People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese
Internet. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012. 203 pp. Paperback $25.00,
isbn 978-1-84150-493-3.
Mary Manjikian. Threat Talk: The Comparative Politics of Internet
Addiction. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. x, 187 pp. Hardcover
$99.95, isbn 978-1-4094-3394-1.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
At first, these two relatively short books appear to have little in common: People’s
Pornography is a work of cultural studies that documents the ephemeral world of
sex scandals, pornographic blogging, and alternative lifestyles on the Chinese
Internet. In contrast, Threat Talk is a relatively staid work of comparative politics
written by a professor of government. In fact, these two books have several things
in common: both authors write about China, but neither is a China specialist; both
self-consciously undertake interdisciplinary work and refuse to restrict themselves
to narrow genre norms; and both are concerned with the way preexisting Chinese
culture influences the reception and use of the Internet in the People’s Republic of
China (PRC). In addition, both works suffer from flaws that threaten to detract
from their value, particularly for China specialists. Overall though, both books are
welcome additions to the literature for the originality and importance of their
topics, despite some weaknesses that might give some readers pause.
Katrien Jacobs has a long history of transgressing academic norms. Her PhD
in comparative literature and media compared archaic rituals of body modification
with the work of performance artists in the sixties and seventies. The method, as
well as the subject, was transgressive: Jacobs’s dissertation combined written
­chapters with video clips of performance art. A more recent project on amateur
net pornography continued her interest in media and the body by examining how
the Internet creates spaces that enable novel forms of sexual expression. The last
chapter of the book discusses pornography in China and reflects Jacobs’s move to
Hong Kong, where she joined the faculty of the City University of Hong Kong
(CUHK). This book is the full presentation of the material she discussed in the
conclusion of her last book; Jacobs has now turned her focus to pornography in
Hong Kong and China, more generally.
People’s Pornography is divided into five chapters. After a brief introduction,
Jacobs takes us through a lengthy discussion of censorship and attempts at free
speech in China and locates sexual expression and experimentation in that wider
context. The second chapter — the longest and most focused of the book — provides
an account of sex blogging on the Internet. A series of shorter chapters then
documents a series of the author’s research projects: interviews with CUHK
students about their consumption of pornography, Jacobs’s autoethnographic
forays into an online dating and sex site, and, finally, a project on queer cosplay
(costume play) and anime (animation) fans.
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Jacobs brings a strong agenda to her book: to discover the joyful and exuberant sexual experimentation that people — but especially women — undertake on the
Internet in their quest to free themselves from the oppressive Chinese state. At
times it seems that the author’s strong agenda threatens to force itself on her
material. This is especially true when it becomes apparent that many of the people
Jacobs discusses are not actually that interested in a joyful exploration of sexual
freedom. For instance, the female college students she interviews are more interested in watching romantic comedies than pornography (although Jacobs’s defintion of pornography is sufficiently capacious to include the former in the later).
Even her expectation that male students might engage in peer-to-peer collaborative sharing of pornography (as did the subjects of her previous book) is dashed. In
fact, they do not share pornography because, as one respondent put it, their
friends are “already overloaded” ( p. 126) with huge collections of downloaded
Japanese pornography.
It is impossible to miss the strong agenda that Jacobs brings to the book. To
her credit, Jacobs never allows her predilections to shape the data. When the
online cultures she examines do not fit her expectations, she notes this fact.
When they are ambivalent or multifaceted, she demonstrates the variations within
them clearly. Although the book’s agenda may seem overwhelming at first, a
careful reading demonstrates that Jacobs cares too much about her material to
mistreat it.
That said, there are other weaknesses within the volume: even given the
sometimes outré choice of methods, the empirical research often lacks the rigor
that this social scientist would hope to see. There is no clear theoretical contribution; although Jacobs does briefly mention a wider theoretical literature, she does
not discuss it in depth or build on it. Indeed, at times her interdisciplinarity
threatens to become simply undisciplined. The book also suffers from a lack of
grounding in Sinological training and any sort of historical contextualization of
pornography. It may be that this decision was made to keep the book short, or
perhaps because the youth culture Jacobs examines is itself slightly amnesic.
However, there is no mention of the long history of Chinese erotica and porno­
graphy (as discussed, for instance, in the work of Giovanni Vitiello) nor is there,
with the exception of a brief mention of the Shaw brothers, any historical depth to
the history of pop culture. This is a book that studies empowered female sexuality
in Hong Kong but does not mention Anita Mui.
Indeed, Jacobs does little to demonstrate the cultural particularity of these
practices — why they are distinctly Chinese — and tells a narrative of liberation and
freedom that could (as Manjikian would point out) equally be framed as the ongoing
colonization of the Chinese erotic imagination by Japanese and American forms.
There is also the issue of the topic itself and the illustrations in the book.
Clearly, the book is supposed to attract readers because of its topic, and Jacobs
obviously wants to transgress traditional sexual norms in the name of liberating
94 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
sexuality. While it is true that those who are prudish will find the drawings of full
frontal nudity inflammatory, for those of us who spend a lot of time online, the illustrations will seem mundane and (at times) superfluous to the argument. For many
scholars, in other words, it is just not interesting or shocking that there are pictures
of naked Asian women on the Internet. Ultimately, despite a number of screenshots, the book lacks any formal analysis of the images or iconography of pornography. Curiously, in a book intent on insisting on the legitimacy of porn, one is left
with a nagging sense that the pornography itself is never fully brought on stage.
As an academic book — especially for worldly academics who find pornography blasé rather than shocking — Jacobs’s book does not recommend itself. On the
other hand, as a book written by an intellectual for a broad audience, People’s
Pornography shines. In particular, Jacobs’s documentation of the ephemeral world
of sex bloggers is a wonderful record of a sphere of popular culture that all too
often slips away without our noticing it. Indeed, it is in this chapter, rather than the
ones in which Jacobs tries her hand at formal research methods, that she really
shines. It is clear that Jacobs has a deep commitment to the material and people
who make it, and she does an excellent job telling their stories. The collage of
different subjects may lack depth, but it provides a wide view of the pop culture
scene that Jacobs is clearly so committed to legitimizing. In this effort, Jacobs is
clearly correct: these topics ought to be discussed and included in the ethnographic record, but too often are ignored.
Jacobs’s book, then, is a valuable addition to our knowledge of China, because
it is an open-ended intellectual piece, not a work that is stuck in the narrow confines of academia. Jacobs will disappoint those who lament the freedom that
cultural studies give to intellectuals. For those interested in the way this form
enables new and interesting intellectual projects, this book will be a fascinating
read. When properly framed by supporting material, the book is obviously
extremely teachable.
Mary Manjikian’s volume is, on the surface, very different from Jacobs’s book.
Manjikian is a political science professor currently teaching in the Department of
Government at Regent University. Her original work was on ministerial reform in
Russia at the end of the Cold War, and Manjikian’s subsequent publications examine political discourse, in particular how policy makers talk about and imagine
risk and disaster. Her book Threat Talk: The Comparative Politics of Internet Addiction starts with a simple and compelling question: Why is Internet addiction
universally accepted as a disease in China, but not in the United States? This is a
bold and original question. Although there is a large body of literature studying
Internet addiction, almost no one has studied the study of Internet addiction. The
central problem of her book is why — and how — people come to believe that the
Internet is addictive.
Manjikian seeks to answer this question by moving beyond the standard
literature in political science and government and drawing on work in anthropology,
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science studies, and psychology. The book begins with an introductory chapter
describing the author’s framework. The next three chapters then move through a
large literature review. The second chapter, the longest in the book, examines how
Internet addiction looks when viewed through the lens of antipsychiatry as developed by Thomas Szasz. The third chapter examines Internet addiction by drawing
on the work of Michel Foucault and scholars influenced by him who study govermentality. The fourth chapter examines how Internet addiction can (and cannot) be
viewed as an epidemic or threat to biosecurity. A final very brief chapter provides a
description of the cultural logic behind Chinese views of Internet addiction.
Manjikian’s interdisciplinarity makes sense: the politics of risk perception,
literature on science studies, and studies of medicalization of mental illness all
have strong elective affinities. Internet addiction is a rich topic perfectly suited for
an approach that combines these works. Manjikian is convincing when she shows
us the congruence between different perceptions of Internet addiction and the
political situation of the scientists who study it. It is a rich vein to be mined, and
Manjikian does a good job exploring it.
At times, however, Manjikian’s wide range threatens to result in overreaching.
While many of her points may be new to her colleagues in political science and
government, they are taken for granted in the literatures from which she draws.
Sheila Jasanoff, for instance, has a distinguished career examining the interaction
of science and politics but is not cited in Threat Talk. At one point, Manjikian
suggests that immersion in the Internet is a way of opting out of real-world biographical projects, a point made forcefully by Edward Castronova, one of the
founders of games studies, but someone not cited by Manjikian. In one of the most
suprising lacunae in the book, Manjikian fails to mention the work of Arthur
Kleinman, an author who has spent decades studying mental illness in China in
cross-cultural perspective. At times, then, one feels that Manjikian is covering
territory that has already been thoroughly explored by others.
This lack of awareness of established figures sometimes involves mistakes that
seem glaring to specialists. For instance, Manjikian claims Paul Rostow was the
author of the “Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace.” In fact, the document
she is referring to is called the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,”
and its author is John Perry Barlow — something most Internet scholars would
know. As for Chinese culture, Manjikian’s discussion of the Confucian origins of
Chinese concerns with Internet addiction will look extremely slender to specialists, and her citational base is just a handful of articles on Chinese medical ethics.
While much of her analysis of Chinese culture occurs throughout the book, the
extremely short last chapter will be particularly disappointing to China specialists.
In at least a half-dozen cases that I did check, even the citations that are made are
not actually included in the bibliography.
Omitting citational obeisances is hardly the greatest sin that a scholar can
commit, and it may be that some of the typographical errors and missing citations
96 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
in bibliography can be laid at the feet of Ashgate’s editorial staff (or the lack
thereof ) rather than the author. But overall one comes away from this book with a
strong sense that a worthwhile scholarly project is not as well executed as it could
be because of the author’s lack of expertise in all of the literatures she draws upon.
There are also other, deeper problems in the book. Science studies famously
question the ontological status of phenomena that scientists and laymen believe
are real and insists on linking knowledge and power. How then can science studies
make claims to truth if it sabotages this notion in the first place? By now, a variety
of answers to this question exists, provided by authors as diverse as Bruno Latour,
Richard Rorty, and Donna Harraway. However, Manjikian never chooses among
these options and never grounds her work epistemologically. Why should we
believe Manjikian’s own arguments if knowledge is a reflex of power? Is she not
just constructing the construction of Internet addiction? There are many possible
answers to this question, but she does not provide them.
Because of the novelty of its topic, Manjikian’s book will be central for studies
of Internet addiction, and for audiences unfamiliar with the literature she cites, her
argument will be eye-opening. Ultimately, the value of Manjikian’s book comes
from the way it demonstrates the value of intellectual cross-fertilization, even if, at
times, the fruit of her labor turns out to be a hybrid.
At first, then, Jacobs and Manjikian seem to be very different authors: the first,
an edgy and transgressive cultural studies scholar; the second, a policy-oriented
thinker from an established discipline. Their approaches to the Internet also differ
greatly. Jacobs champions Chinese seeking freedom from what she sees as a repressive Chinese state. Manjikian, on the other hand, argues that Chinese monitoring
of the Internet and its users is a legitimate expression of Chinese culture and
insists that Western views of the Internet as an inherently liberating medium are
problematically ethnocentric. As we have seen, they have more than just their
shared topic in common: both books approach China from an interdisciplinary or
(in Jacobs’s case) undisciplined perspective, a perspective that renders both of
them problematic.
China scholars might consider the authors’ lack of real expertise a drawback,
but, in the end, both books make important contributions to the literature because
of their willingness to engage new and unusual topics in an original way. Ultimately,
both books provide important insights into the role the Internet plays in China
today, and both deserve an audience.
Alex Golub
Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at
Mānoa specializing in studies of the way real-world culture influences virtual worlds,
video games, and other new media technologies.
Reviews 97
Roger B. Jeans, editor. The Marshall Mission to China, 1945–1947:
The Letters and Diary of Colonel John Hart Caughey. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. xxiii, 289 pp. Hardcover $84.00,
isbn 978-1-4422-1294-7.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
This documentary volume adds to the collection of sources on the Marshall
Mission to China from December 1945 to January 1947. The letters and diary edited
by Roger B. Jeans — largely from the John Hart Caughey Papers at the George C.
Marshall Research Library — throw a personal light on the American efforts at
mediation between the two political rivals, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government (GMD) in Chongqing and Nanjing and Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) based in Yan’an. A legion of American advisors in China — including
Joseph W. Stilwell, Patrick Hurley, George C. Marshall, Albert C. Wedemeyer, and
John Leighton Stuart — personified this peacemaking endeavor as well as underlining the limits of American influence in China in the midst of a domestic Chinese
revolution.
Parts 1 and 2 provide useful background information, drawn from solid
archival and secondary materials, on the Marshall Mission to China and on Colonel John Hart Caughey, respectively. In November 1945, Patrick J. Hurley resigned
his position as ambassador to China. While the China question was debated and
politicized in Congress, President Harry Truman appointed General of the Army
George C. Marshall as his special representative to China with the personal rank
of ambassador. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, thirty-four-year-old
Caughey was regarded as one of the general’s “bright boys” ( p. 9). He served as
executive officer, Marshall’s closest subordinate in the political tinderbox of postwar China.
Caughey’s letters and diary, reproduced in parts 3 and 4, strengthen our
understanding of and lend color to various aspects of the Marshall Mission. The
volume as a whole complements existing accounts of the Marshall Mission, including Marshall’s own work, Marshall’s Mission to China, December 1945–January
1947: The Report and Appended Documents; The Forgotten Ambassador: The Reports
of John Leighton Stuart, 1946–1949, edited by Kenneth W. Rea and John C. Brewer;
John Robinson Beal’s Marshall in China; Larry I. Bland, Roger B. Jeans, and Mark
F. Wilkinson’s George C. Marshall’s Mediation Mission to China, December 1945–
January 1947; and War and Peace with China: First-hand Experiences in the Foreign
Service of the United States, edited by Marshall Green, John H. Holdridge, and
William N. Stokes.
This book illuminates the positive achievements of the period, such as the
unprecedented cooperation between Nationalist China and the United States at the
diplomatic, economic, military, and cultural levels. While these turbulent years
reveal the roots of the conflict that divided the United States and the People’s
98 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Republic of China after 1949, when viewed in long-term perspective, they also
suggest that in some sense Americans and Chinese were drawn closer together
through their embattled relationship.
The Caughey archive underscores the fact that the Marshall mission was
hobbled from the outset by its contradictory objectives, as the government’s
instructions to him show. Marshall was told that the United States must side with
Chiang, even if he proved obdurate, lest a disintegrating China and Soviet dominance in Manchuria thwart the “major purpose of our war in the Pacific.” “The
existence of autonomous armies such as that of the Communist army is inconsistent with, and actually makes impossible, political unity in China.” It was in the
United States’ interest that Chiang end the conflict with the Communists, democratize his government, and maintain peace and unity by broadening “the bases of
that Government . . . to include other political elements in the country” — because
the United States could not support Chiang by “military intervention in an internecine struggle.” “With the institution of a broadly representative government,
autonomous armies should be eliminated as such and all armed forces in China
integrated effectively into the Chinese National army.”1 Documents in this volume
clearly show that the following impossible goals doomed Marshall’s mediation
efforts: the United States withdrew its support for Chiang, Chiang carried out
reforms aimed at enhancing his standing with the Chinese people, the United
States sided with the Communists, and, finally, the American government dis­
engaged from the China theater altogether.
Compounding the contradictions inherent in the U.S. position, the deepseated divisions between the Nationalist and Communist parties, as well as with
the Russians, hindered the mediation efforts of Marshall. In June 1946, Caughey
commented: “One day it is the Communists that are obstreperous and the next it is
the National Govt. [sic] that is not in line. . . . It seems that for time beyond man’s
recollection, China has been the desire and design of people outside of China.
What that has to do with China, as China’s today, is another question, but the fact
remains that many nations have their eyes on this place out here” ( p. 125). Therefore, the United States in Caughey’s view had a “great responsibility in trying to
keep the situation straight” ( p. 125). A ceasefire between the GMD and the CCP
was reached in January 1946 and lasted intermittently for barely a year. In the
summer of 1946, Marshall imposed an arms embargo on the Nationalists, which
remained in effect until late May 1947. The two parties were unable to agree on the
composition of even small committees to discuss the reorganization of the state
council to form a joint government that would end the GMD’s one-party rule. In
November 1946, the Nationalist-dominated National Assembly was convened, and
the Communists immediately demanded its dissolution.
In early December 1946, the CCP broke off all negotiations. However,
­Marshall still held out some hope for a political solution. He was “anxious to get
started on something different” ( p. 35). He believed that “successful action” on the
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part of the “liberals” in the Nationalist government and in the “minority parties . . .
under the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek” would “lead to unity
through good government.”2 It was not to happen. In January 1947, President
Truman recalled Marshall and shortly afterwards appointed him as secretary of
state.
Caughey’s eyewitness account constitutes a personal tribute to George C.
Marshall, a “great man” who “subjugated himself to a purpose . . . thinking of
anything but himself and the aspect of his personal well being” ( pp. 156–157).
The documents published here defend Marshall and his mission, indicating that
Marshall tried his best, leaving no stone unturned, in his efforts to carry out his
presidential mandate ( pp. 34–35). In Caughey’s judgment, neither the Communists
nor the Nationalists really wanted compromise. The Nationalists were afraid of a
coalition government. They “distrusted the Communists more than the other way
around” ( p. 35). The Caughey letters and diary also reveal his acute powers of
observation — ranging from despair at the casual conduct of the U.S. House
­Military Affairs Committee in China, the influence wielded by John Leighton
Stuart on leading Chinese, details of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s gift-giving and
lavish lifestyle, to his positive impressions of Zhou Enlai’s commanding but
­amiable demeanor. All in all, I would recommend this book to students who are
interested in war, peace negotiations, and the history of United States–China
relations.
Dong Wang
Dong Wang is a professorial senior fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen in
Germany.
Notes
1. Quotes in this paragraph are from “The Marshall Mission: Instructions to General of the
Army George C. Marshall regarding United States Policy toward China; First Conferences in
China,” in U.S. State Department, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States,
Diplomatic Papers, 1945. The Far East, China, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1945), pp. 745–828.
2. Statement made by General Marshall on January 19, 1947, Department of State Bulletin 16,
no. 394: 83–85.
100 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Linda Cooke Johnson. Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and
Identity in Liao and Jin China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011.
254 pp. Hardcover $52.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3404-3.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
The women in Johnson’s concise study lived in present day Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and the prefectures in the Beijing region under the Kitan Liao (916–1125)
and its conqueror, the Jurchen Jin (1127–1234), that expanded the Liao territory
southward to north of the Huai river. The two dynastic changes brought a transformative acculturation to the multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural population of North China from the tenth to the early part of the thirteenth centuries.
Solidly anchored on archaeological data, dynastic histories, paintings, and travelogues, the seven chapters are conceptualized with clarity, from which emerges a
comparative study of the women from the Kitan 契丹, Jurchen 女真, haner 漢兒
(blended Chinese), and Han 漢 or nanren 南人 (Chinese/southern residents)
constituencies. Two dozen illustrations add a visual dimension to the complexities
of minority and majority women as they reconfigured cultural identities and made
adjustments going through the passages of life.
The first chapter searches the dynastic histories for records of empresses and
princesses, in addition to lienü 烈女 (exemplary) biographies, epitaphs, and
inscriptions, to identify and contextualize the womanly ideals during the two
centuries of Liao rule and a century of Jin administration. The indigenous Chinese
dynasties prescribed for their women Confucian ethics such as sacrifice, chastity,
filial piety, and education of sons. The praiseworthy women of the Liao and the Jin
added wise counsel, military acts, and hunting activities that, according to Johnson, gave women greater agency. One of the five Liao biographies was on a Han
woman who was married into the imperial clan and who supported Chinese
culture. The other four biographies showcased Kitan nationals, three of whom
committed suicide to follow their husbands in death. Twelve Jin biographies
focused on Jurchen women, and another ten were drawn from Bohai (the conquered Korean state of Parhae), haner, and Han ethnicities. These women were
familiar with Confucian classics and Chinese culture; they provided moral guidance to posterity and fought like men to defend their charges or committed suicide
to defend their honor.
The next two chapters reconstruct the daily lives and material culture of
women living under the Liao and Jin. For the Liao period, the strongest evidence
comes from tomb burials. The largest tombs belonged to the Yelü imperial clan
and the Xiao clan, from which the Kitan emperors and princes exclusively chose
consorts. Burial goods and wall paintings depicting the pastoral lifestyle, equestrian culture, and the mobile yurts lend support to the womanly ideals praised in
the lienü biographies. Scenes of Kitan women on horses riding astride with their
brothers, or walking freely on the streets, sharply contrast with the life of Han girls
who were separated from male playmates at the age of six. Kitan women looked
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after the home and herds when men were at war. The many single burials for Kitan
women indicate their relative positions of strength in Kitan society. The smaller
tombs belonged to the haner, such as the Hann and Zhang collaborator families
who accepted some Kitan customs and practices. The Kitan attire and hairstyle of
the men, the children, and the servants indicate that they adopted Kitan culture at
a quicker pace than did the women, who wore Chinese silks and sported Chinese
hairstyles. Johnson tells us that they were preservers of Han culture and probably
continued to speak Chinese, inspired, as they were, by the story of Cai Wenji, a
poetess who remained loyal to the Han dynasty. In 207, she left her Xiongnu
husband and their children to return to the Han capital of Chang’an. To the Han
and haner, she was a preserver of Han culture, but the Kitans and Jurchens represented her in military attire manifesting the martial and heroic ideals of exemplary
women.
In the Jin period, the outcome of Shizong’s (1161–1190) fundamentalist, ­nativist
campaign against sinicization can be seen in one of the few Jin tomb excavations.
In the relative scarcity of such evidence, Johnson’s reconstruction of Jin women’s
daily lives mainly derived from historical and literary sources. To the extent that
the sheng 生 (raw) Jurchens and pastoral life became marginalized, daily life for
the other Jurchens became more lavish. The Bohai women who married into the
imperial clan valued the Confucian classics and facilitated the process of acculturation with Han culture. Haner and Han women in the Jin lived a life similar to
their counterparts in the Liao, as preservers of Han and Song culture and customs.
Johnson states that the Jin haner, having switched loyalty twice (to Kitan and then
to Jurchen), were treated as less loyal than the Kitan haner. Both the haner and
southern women (formerly Song residents living in the area between Beijing and
the Huai river) preserved Han culture through Chinese clothing and language
retention.
In the next two chapters, the degree of agency among Kitan, Jurchen, haner,
and Han women can be seen more distinctly in sexuality, marriage, and widowhood. In contrast to the critical importance of chastity placed on haner and Han
women, virginity was not required for marriage for the elite Kitan and Jurchen
women, who did not bind their feet, married relatively later, and engaged in sexual
relations. However, once the parents arranged the marriage, the bride lost the
freedom for premarital sex. In that connection, we are given one of the few occasions to observe women in the lower classes: virginity was also not required in
marriage, but these women had to find their own marriage partners, which they
did by singing of their beauty and talents on street corners. Virginity was not
an issue because of the bride-stealing customs of the Kitans, Jurchens, and the
­Mongols during their pre-dynastic periods.
In the Kitan and Jurchen marriage, the groom paid the bride price, and upon
marriage, the bride became the property of the marital family and cut off ties with
the natal family. In haner and Han marriages, a dowry accompanied the bride into
102 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
her marriage, and when widowed, she could keep the dowry and take it with her
on return to her natal family or upon a remarriage. While all Chinese women were
expected to marry, it seems that Kitan and Jurchen women had more options, and
some remain unmarried and others joined Buddhist nunneries. Certainly the large
number of single Liao tombs of women indicates a frequent choice to remain
single. The Kitans and Jurchens practiced the sororate, and the emperors later
adopted the Chinese tradition of designating only one empress at a time and
marrying the other women as imperial concubines.
Upon the husband’s death, the wife had the option of agreeing to a levirate
remarriage to the brother or cousin of the deceased, or following her husband into
death, a widespread Altaic tribal custom. Johnson presents a spectacular case of a
widow exercising agency in 926, when the founding Liao emperor (r. 916–926)
died, and his widow, Empress Dowager Yingtian (878–953), escaped death by
cutting off her right hand at the wrist and throwing it into his coffin.
The chapter on woman warriors continues the narrative of Empress Dowager
Yingtian as an exemplary woman who, among many others in the elite Kitan
lineages, had an extraordinary military career that recorded many acts of heroism
before and after widowhood. A member of the prestigious Xiao clan that exclusively
married into the Liao imperial clan, she had helped to declare the Liao dynasty
and set up her husband as emperor. Left in charge in his absences, she led battles
against revolts. Widowed and without her right hand, she survived challenges to
her choice of her second son as emperor, and when he died in 943, she led forces
against her grandson. When he was murdered, she lived to support another grandson on the throne and was still engaged in military campaigns in her sixties. Her
grandniece, Empress Dowager Chengtian (953–1009), similarly lived for another
twenty-seven years after widowhood. The mother of Shengzong (r. 982–1031),
Chengtian negotiated the ground-breaking Treaty of Shanyuan in 1005 with the
Northern Song (960–1127). Even in her fifties, she was still leading armies to the
battlefield and continuing a thirty-six-year affair with the grand councilor Hann
Derong, a haner.
Johnson brings into discussion a third woman warrior of Han ethnicity living
at the end of the Jin dynasty. Yang Miaozhen (1193–1250) was a commoner and a
bandit leader who controlled the area between Shandong and Huai regions. When
she was twenty years old, another bandit joined her gang, and she had an affair
with him and proposed marriage. She was the brains behind the military campaigns as she guided her bandit husband through campaigns with the Song and
the Mongols. Johnson makes a highly original argument for interpreting Yang
Miaozhen as a warrior in the Liao and Jin traditions of exemplary women with
military attributes, instead of being negatively viewed as an anomaly of a Chinese
woman stepping out of bounds of Confucian morality. In the last chapter, Johnson
adds intriguing details to our understanding of how education, religion, and
romance affected the private lives of women in conquest dynasties.
Reviews 103
Johnson has given us strong evidence from several disciplines to support the
claim that Kitan women had more agency than Jurchen women, who themselves
exercised more agency than haner and Han women. As a concluding remark,
Johnson questions whether the women of Liao and Jin can be seen as unique with
respect to their historical roles and military talents. The answer seems to be no, as
she tells us that parallel qualities can be found in the Western Xia (1038–1227) and
Western Liao (1124–1218), among other regimes. Nevertheless, I feel that each of
the women brought forward in the volume, in particular Cai Wenji in the Wenji
gui Han painting, pulsates with life at the shifting of cultural identity under Kitan
and Jurchen rule.
Jennifer W. Jay
Jennifer W. Jay, a professor of history and classics at the University of Alberta, works
on modern and premodern Chinese history and literature.
Michael Keevak. Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. xii, 219 pp. Illustrated.
Hardcover $29.95, isbn 978-0-691-14031-5.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Becoming Yellow is a smart, erudite, intriguing, quirky, delightful, and ultimately
unsatisfying book. Michael Keevak sets out to trace how, from the sixteenth
century to the nineteenth, the skin color of East Asians changed from white to
yellow in the minds of Europeans and how all East Asians came to be viewed as
members of a single Mongolian race. His larger purpose may be to comment on
the broader history of European racial thinking and, perhaps, to displace whiteness and blackness from the core of that story, although he never quite articulates
that intent.
Keevak traces the ideas of some familiar racial thinkers: Linneaus, Blumenbach, Buffon, Cuvier, Broca, Gobineau, and Davenport. He also gives us a taste of
the ideas of a lot of writers whose racial ideas have remained hidden to all but the
most diligent scholars — people such as Giovanni da Empoli, Duarte Barbosa, Juan
González de Mendoza, Karl Gützlaff, François Bernier, Johann Christian Polykarp
Erxleben, G. S. Mellin, James Cowles Prichard, Carl Gustav Carus, and dozens of
others.
The main outlines of Keevak’s book are clear. Becoming Yellow begins with an
introduction that gestures toward several topics that will be treated later in the
book. There follows a chapter on how the skin and character of East Asians were
104 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
perceived by European scholars and missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. These are followed by an account of how Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and
their eighteenth-century contemporaries arrived at yellow as the color that would
stand for East Asians, and how they decided that Mongolians were the core people
in East Asia. Then follows a chapter on the rise of anthropometry in the nineteenth
century and the measurement of so-called Mongolians’ skull shapes, skin color,
and the like. The next chapter focuses on the fascination of nineteenth-century
Western medicine with Asian bodies — the so-called Mongolian eyefold, the
Mongolian spot, Mongolism, and so on. The final chapter is a hodge-podge that
briefly describes the turn-of-the-century Western political movement fed by fear
of invasion by a “yellow peril.” It outlines the very different responses of Chinese
and Japanese writers to Western ideas about Asian skin color and attempts to sum
them up.
Keevak has a curious manner of pursing an argument. Despite the fairly clear
overall arc of the book, each chapter is quite muddled internally. Keevak tends,
early in each chapter, to refer, without explanation or context, to key ideas that he
has not introduced (but, it turns out, may develop later). This approach suggests
that the reader and author had already discussed the issue, so he does not have to
establish or articulate its significance. The narrative in each chapter whirls around
its subject, feinting here and there, rather than proceeding in a linear fashion.
Keevak offers lots of esoteric details, all dutifully footnoted. He presents them by
way of illustrating points, rather than as proof that his points are true. Even so, his
knowledge is impressive. Then, when he comes to the major assertions in each
chapter’s argument, there are no notes at all, and everything proceeds at the level
of naked assertion. It is as if Keevak is displaying all his minute and intricate
learning early on, so that we will believe him later, when he makes, unsupported,
the key parts of his argument.
Nonetheless, many of his ideas are arresting, even if unsupported. To take
just one example, Keevak concludes that “yellow began as a way of emphasizing
Chinese proximity to Europeans . . . but . . . over time it had become redeployed
as a term of complexional distance” ( p. 34). This assertion might be true, though
Keevak does not really demonstrate it, much less prove it.
Despite the shortcomings of his approach, each chapter is, nonetheless, quite
delightful if one can let go of the need for linear arguments undergirded by solid
supporting evidence. Keevak is so learned about odd esoterica that the reader can
sit back and just enjoy the details. In each chapter Keevak presents a lovely collection —
a bit like John Soane’s house on Lincoln Inn’s Fields in London — of overstuffed
rooms of ephemera, all jumbled together, each of interest individually, though they
are more or less without relationship to each other or to a narrative arc when taken
together. It is an impressionistic delight if one adopts the barnacle method (attach
oneself to a rock, let it all wash past, and enjoy whatever nutrients drop in), rather
than insisting on a rigorous, systematic analysis.
Reviews 105
By the time we reach the end of Becoming Yellow, we do not really know (and I
suspect Keevak does not know) how and why Asians came to be yellow in the
minds of Europeans. Nor do we exactly know what that has to do with the broader
history of racial thinking that he promised at the outset to illuminate. However, we
have taken a fascinating tour of hundreds of alleys and byways in early modern
European thinking, and we have been entertained, if not exactly enlightened, along
the way.
Paul Spickard
Paul Spickard teaches history, ethnic studies, and East Asian studies at UC Santa
Barbara. He is the author or editor of seventeen books and many articles, including
Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World; Racial Thinking in the
United States; and Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race and Colonialism in
American History and Identity.
Weijing Lu. True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial
China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. xiii, 347 pp.
Hardcover $60.00, isbn 978-0-8047-5808-6.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
In the Ming to Qing dynasties, faithful maidens (zhennü 貞女), most in their teens
to thirties, committed suicide or carried out other acts of fidelity to honor their
deceased fiancés. About five thousand of them earned a place in a subgroup among
exemplary/martyred women (lienü 烈女) and chaste widows (jiefu 節婦) in their
communities as well as in the local and general histories of late imperial China.
Perusing dynastic and reign records, gazetteers, biographies, Confucian literati
discourse, and the few writings by women, Lu’s study of the cult or social phenomenon of faithful maidens is a substantive contribution to the disciplines of women’s/
gender studies and Chinese social history. Seven provocatively titled chapters
grouped into three parts (history, choices, and ideology) engage the reader in an
edifying exercise to contextualize the faithful maidens and their exercise of agency
in the backdrop of the sociopolitical environment and within a Confucian discourse.
Throughout the study, Lu reiterates her primary arguments: faithful maidens
willingly played an active role in self-defining the conduct of honor and duty; the
social environment, political crises, and government mechanism of honor caused a
social practice to proliferate into a cult in the Qing; and through this cult, these
young women had an impact in shaping history and culture across communities in
premodern China.
106 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
True to the author’s respect for the individuals under discussion, Lu refers to
them by name whenever possible, beginning with the Shijing 詩經 reference to
Lady Weixuan 衛宣夫人 and the Cypress Boat 柏舟 vow in the Spring and
Autumn Period (771–476 b.c.e.), from which the cult of faithful maidens originated. The daughter of the duke of Qi, Weixuan mourned the death of her fiancé
and refused to marry his brother. Such acts of fidelity were given a moralistic
interpretation in the late eighth century, linking ritual to female virtue. In the
thirteenth century, the faithful maidens were placed above virtuous women and
commemorated in collective biographies. Here we read about faithful maidens
disfiguring or killing themselves to reject another betrothal, or following their
fiancés to death, or living the rest of their lives as virgin widows.
The cult of faithful maidens developed in the fourteenth century and generated a spurt of growth as it crossed paths with the political crises of the seventeenth century (dynastic change and Ming resistance). However, it was between
1644 and 1850 that the cult proliferated as the state became more intrusive in social
conduct and granted exemption of corvée taxes to families of faithful maidens, in
addition to expanding the mechanism of honoring testimonials (jingbiao 旌表)
and granting of commemorative arches and shrines. Visitors to some of the shrines
claimed to have experienced spiritual rejuvenation and efficacious incidents that
derived from the moral strength of the women honored by these shrines. Compared to 156 faithful maidens honored in the Ming, 4,394 faithful maidens received
honoring testimonials between 1644 and 1850. By the mid-nineteenth century,
with a population in China of 400 million, many more faithful maidens must have
practiced acts of fidelity than the average of 21.8 individuals honored per year.
Indeed, the cult was widespread in the empire and especially concentrated in the
lower Yangzi, the economic powerhouse of the empire.
The cult had originated in literate, elite families, but as it cut across class and
education lines, there was ample representation from the top political and intellectual circles as well as from illiterate peasant families. Confucian literati, who
recorded these biographies and then circulated them from localities to the central
government, played a pivotal role in popularizing the acts of fidelity. Faithful
maidens became public and personal icons of morality, which Confucian scholars
felt a social and personal responsibility to document. The moral icon moved
thinkers such as Liu Zongzhou (1578–1645), who killed himself out of loyalty to the
Ming upon completion of the biographies of a chaste woman and a faithful
maiden.
Lu informs us that late imperial China yields no demographic data on an
increased mortality rate of betrothed young men, whose untimely deaths gave
rise to the self-identity of surviving fiancées, the faithful maidens. She relates
dozens of narratives of faithful maidens who chose particular acts or paths of
fidelity to honor their deceased betrothed. Marriage was a matter negotiated
by the parents of the bride and groom in traditional China, and before the
Reviews 107
actual marriage ceremonies, the bride and groom had likely not met. Because
all the marriage rituals had not taken place before the groom’s death, it was
­permissible for the bride to go into another betrothal. Parents loved their
­daughters and wanted a normal life for them, not the uncertain journey taken by
faithful maidens — death or a life of being unmarried and widowed at the same
time.
Upon hearing the news of the fiancés’ deaths, the faithful maidens, many of
them just young teenagers, defied their parents and carried out horrifying acts:
self-mutilation (cutting off hair, fingers, nose, or ears; pricking the eyes; disfiguring
the face). Some hastened to kill themselves (benxun 奔殉) or “set up a platform to
die for chastity” (datai sijie 搭台死節) by hanging, jumping off a cliff, drowning in
a well or in the river, stabbing and immolating themselves, swallowing gold, or
taking poison until they succeeded in their mission to die. There is an instant
fulfillment of virtue and reassurance of no violation of reputation upon immediate
death. Other faithful maidens from both elite and commoner backgrounds chose a
life after the death of the fiancé. It was reported that in 1692, men on the streets of
Beijing wept profusely upon hearing about the sad story of the merchant daughter
Kang, who defied her brother and father to marry the ghost of her fiancé. The
teenage peasant girl Song Dian hanged herself and was honored as a faithful
maiden by the Qing court in 1665. Zhu Shi (1664–1736), the Qianlong emperor’s
teacher, had a daughter who was a faithful maiden to whom Qianlong wrote
poems of praise.
Some delayed death until they had married the corpses of their fiancés in
spirit marriages, or after mourning them as husbands, or after adopting heirs for
the husbands’ patrilines. If they did not die, they brought up the heirs while living
the rest of their lives as chaste widows and virgin mothers. However, this life was
a long journey fraught with uncertainty and difficulties. Lu informs us that while
the central government praised faithful maidens, it did not offer them protection
from domestic abuse by in-laws and conflict arising in natal families. The fiancé’s
family might not want the faithful maiden to carry out the ghost marriage
because it would mean an additional mouth to feed and responsibility for her care.
If she stayed at her natal home, her brothers might resent her being a burden to
them. If she adopted an heir, the marital family and lineage would not want to
split the estate with the heir, even though he would have been from the same
patriline as the fiancé’s lineage. Fifteen-sui Song Jingwei had completed a
spirit marriage and was resigned to a celibate life at her dead fiancé’s home,
­accompanied by her maid, whose own fiancé had also died. When refused the
request to adopt an heir, she and the maid killed themselves. Adoption was granted
to the educated mother of the renowned scholar Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), who had
been seventeen sui when her fiancé died. She tried to starve herself to death, then
married the dead fiancé, serving her sick mother-in-law diligently to the point of
chopping off her finger to use as medicine to heal her. She adopted Gu Yanwu as
108 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
heir to her deceased fiancé, and when the Ming fell, she starved herself to death at
sixty sui.
There are few recorded happy endings for those who chose the life of the
faithful maiden. The few that did occur were circulated through popular plays. In
the eighteenth century, Cheng Yunyuan was two sui when his parents betrothed
him to a girl from the north, but she disappeared. It turned out she lived half a
century as a faithful maiden and showed up at his teaching post. They married,
and she reportedly had two sons, an incredulous claim given that she was in her
fifties. In another story, a faithful maiden mother had raised Zhang Lun, who took
first place in the three civil service examinations and later became a minister in the
Ming. This family saga became celebrated in the drama Shang Lu Earning Triple
First Place.
The ideology of the faithful maidens is taken up in a detailed analysis in the
last chapter, where Lu informs us that, in contrast to the absence of ideological
controversy over the exemplary category of chaste women, the Confucian discourse on faithful maidens is characterized by ambivalence and a debate often
shaped by personal connections to the faithful maiden cult. There is agreement
that the Confucian classics contain few records of faithful maidens and did not
prescribe the acts of fidelity that faithful maidens conducted. A number of critics
understood the obligations of the widow to be chaste for her deceased husband,
but they could not grasp how the faithful maiden, who had neither married into
the fiancé’s family nor had had sexual relations with the deceased fiancé, could
have qing 情, or love and emotions, that tied her to yi 義, the obligation to commit
to a life of self-sacrifice to his ghost and to his surviving family. In that respect, like
the parents, they viewed the acts of fidelity as excessive, too extreme, and over­
stepping the correctness of ritual propriety. There was considerable debate about
which stage of the betrothal and marriage ceremonies constituted acceptance of
the bride as the deceased groom’s wife and as a daughter-in-law of his surviving
parents. The prose writer Gui Youguang (1507–1571) opined that the Confucian
classics neither endorsed the death of a betrothed girl nor prescribed a celibate life
for her. Jiao Xun (1763–1820) argued that the ritual from the classics needed to take
a backseat to the imperial law that supported the faithful maiden cult. Wang
Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) offered the rare female voice as she reinterpreted Lady
Weixuan’s fidelity and criticized the faithful maiden cult as being excessive and
outside propriety.
Lu ends the story of young women who killed themselves or became virgin
widows by telling us that the New Culture Movement in the early twentieth
­century abolished the cult of faithful maidens. Her inquiry is impressive by the
sheer volume of sources consulted and the expansive geographic scope
scrutinized. She reinstates her argument that the faithful maiden cult derived
from the active agency of the women themselves, but its growth was driven by a
patriarchal ideology and an expanded state mechanism honoring testimonials
Reviews 109
that celebrated acts of fidelity. This active agency was connected to political
­crises in late imperial China, and it played a role in shaping Chinese culture and
history.
Jennifer W. Jay
Jennifer W. Jay, a professor of history and classics at the University of Alberta, works
on modern and premodern Chinese history and literature.
Paul G. Pickowicz. China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation,
and Controversy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. 376 pp.
Hardcover $90.00, isbn 978-1-4422-1178-0.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Here in my hand lies the fruits of Paul Pickowicz’s nearly four decades of dedicated
research on Chinese film culture. In China on Film: A Century of Exploration,
Confrontation, and Controversy, Pickowicz recounts his intimate encounters with
the history of Chinese film, culture, and society throughout China’s long twentieth
century, not only as a historian but also as a movie lover. Informed by both the
personal and political, Pickowicz’s volume provides fresh analytical and conceptual
frameworks to the study of the Chinese film industry and culture that are at once
humanistic and brave, for they seek to recover human agency within the strict
confines of China’s socialist and postsocialist machineries.
Written at various stages in his career, Pickowicz’s engaging study of Chinese
filmmaking brings to bear the complexity of the cultural politics of Chinese film as
expressions of historical trauma, tools of domestic ideological control as well as
the medium of political resistance. The twelve chapters in this volume approach
the study of Chinese film history from various perspectives and thematic concerns. Some of the most fascinating chapters include the close textual analysis of
the representations of modern marriage in 1920s Shanghai film (chapter 1), the
melodramatic mode of film narration (chapter 3), the intricacies between art and
politics in the controversies of Occupation cinema (chapter 4) and the survival
tactics employed by such artists as Shi Hui (chapter 6) and Zheng Junli (chapter 7)
in the new “state socialist system of cultural production” ( p. 10).
Indeed, Pickowicz reminds us that the study of Chinese films could offer us
rare glimpses into China’s nationalist struggles to survive in the shifting global
world order as well as China’s unofficial grassroots politics in the past and present.
For instance, the representations of spiritual pollution (jingshen wuran) in Chinese
films during the 1930s as Occidentalist caricatures of Western culture were not so
110 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
much about Western culture at the time as about China’s critiques of bourgeois
liberalization (chapter 2). Either as national allegories of postwar narratives of
victory and defeat (chapter 5), or representations of unofficial political thought of
Chinese society (chapter 9), Chinese filmmakers have long used films to comment
on and critique the political conditions of socialist and postsocialist China.
At the outset, Pickowicz confidently declares, “I prefer optimism” ( p. 17). It
may be true that, at times, Chinese filmmakers experienced limited freedom in
artistic creations, such as during the cultural thaw in the early 1960s (chapter 8). At
other times, Chinese filmmakers, similar to their counterparts in socialist Eastern
Europe, were mere captives in the velvet prison. Their films were circumscribed by
the political economy of party politics, state censorship, and domestic and international market imperatives and were merely tools that reinforced the socialist
regime of fear and silence (chapter 11). Pickowicz’s insightful explorations of the
courage of Chinese filmmakers to confront their postsocialist condition (chapter
10) and the possibility of resistance within the perennial socialist condition of
postsocialist China in the indulgent cinema of the sixth generation’s underground
filmmakers (chapter 12) demonstrates his faith in the power of cinema to document and provide an alternative narrative of the human condition beyond the
strangle hold of state control.
From the very outset, readers discover that Pickowicz’s scholarly commitment
runs much deeper than that of an academic scholar whose interests merely lie in
uncovering the historical significance of Chinese film industry to its society.
Pickowicz is also an insider, whose expertise on Chinese history and years of
experience living in and observing China guide his readers through a journey and
adventure of “cultural exchange” ( p. 2). At the heart of this book is the question of
how Chinese films have addressed the contentious nature of being Chinese in and
through the tumultuous twentieth century of China’s contests with itself and with
the rest of the world. In this adventure of reading and seeing Chinese films, readers
learn how Chinese films reflected, shaped, and responded to the political and
cultural contexts that gave rise to their productions. They also discover how films
engaged with their audiences not only then, but also now, and not only in China,
but also beyond.
At stake is the agency of filmmakers and their audiences as well as the potential power of artistic freedom and political resistance. I find the question of postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak of whether the subaltern can speak1 extremely
relevant to our appreciation of how the cultural works of Chinese filmmakers are
also expressions of their perennial struggles within the intense politicization of
culture and society in China. I was moved not only by Pickowicz’s honest and
candid exposition of his personal reactions as a film aficionado to the various
Chinese films he saw throughout the years, but also by his intellectual commitment to contextualizing his film analyses within the larger frameworks of the
cultural politics and political economy of the Chinese film industry. Equipped with
Reviews 111
the judiciousness of an unrelenting historian and the sensitivity of a devout filmgoer, Pickowicz exposes the multifarious ironies of the politics of Chinese filmmaking from the 1920s through the present. Films that I have yet to see emerged
from the pages and came alive in his eloquent prose. It is precisely in his lively and
engaging analyses of key significant film texts that we can begin to hear the filmmakers speak, of their anxieties and despair, but still louder of their hopes and
aspirations, exhilarations and courage. Indeed, China on Film is truly a history of
China’s filmic romance and violence, from the bottom up.
Jing Jing Chang
Jing Jing Chang is an assistant professor of film studies at Wilfrid Laurier University
in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She completed her PhD in modern Chinese history
and cinema studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research
interests include Chinese cinemas, Cold War Hong Kong, and postcolonial studies.
Note
1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.
Morten Schlütter and Stephen F. Teiser, editors. Readings of the Platform
Sūtra. Columbia Readings of Buddhist Literature. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012. ix, 232 pp. Hardcover $82.50, isbn 978-0-231-15820-6.
Paperback $27.50, isbn 978-0-231-15821-3.
Philip Yampolsky. The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of the
Tun-huang Manuscript. New foreword by Morten Schlütter. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012. 276 pp. Hardcover $25.00, isbn
978-0-231-15957-9.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Before reviewing Readings of the Platform Sūtra, I will give an overview of the
history of Chinese Chan Buddhism by referring to John R. McRae’s (1947–2011)
succinct Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese
Buddhism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). McRae demythologized
and objectively outlined the history of Chinese Chan/Zen/Sŏn Buddhism in four
periods: (1) proto-Chan (ca. 500–600); (2) early Chan (ca. 600–900); (3) middle
Chan (ca. 750–1000); and (4) Song dynasty Chan (ca. 950–1300). He does not
include history after the Song dynasty up to the present.
112 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Modern scholars, including McRae, Philip B. Yampolsky (1920–1996), and
contributors to Readings of the Platform Sūtra, deconstructed the general picture
of Chinese Chan Buddhism romanticized retrospectively by Song-dynasty Chan
historians and text compilers and accepted traditionally among Chan Buddhists.
They academically investigated the historical development of Chan Buddhism and
removed the mythologized and mystified religious elements in early Chinese Chan
Buddhism, in particular, and Chinese Chan Buddhism, in general, attempting to
understand it objectively.
First, proto-Chan Buddhism designates ascetic practices and meditation of
the practitioners including Bodhidharma, Huike, and their direct disciples. They
meditated based on the theory of Buddha-nature at multiple locations in north
China. Since then, modern scholars removed the religiously fabricated elements
in proto-Chan Buddhism and academically reconstructed the characteristics of
proto-Chan Buddhism based on Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices,
attributed to Bodhidharma; traditional Chan texts; and a few Dunhuang
documents.
Second, the development of early Chan Buddhism began with meditators such
as Daoxin (580–651), Hongren (601–674), Shenxiu (606?–706), Huineng (638–713),
and Shenhui (648–758), as well as the practitioners of northern, southern, and
Oxhead factions. Each Chan group began to practice its different methods of
meditation and develop its own lineage theory as its unifying ideology. Modern
scholars can outline early Chan Buddhism through the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth
Patriarch, numerous Dunhuang manuscripts, and traditional Chan sources. The
Platform Sūtra is a fascinating text attributed to Huineng, the legendary founder of
Chan Buddhism, and the only text that attained sūtra status among the texts that
Chinese made.
Third, the major figures of middle Chan are Mazu (709–788), Shitou (710–
790), and Linji (d. 867). The antecedent masters of the Five Houses, coming
from the Hongzhou and Hubei factions that originated from Mazu and Shitou,
respectively, began to use encounter dialogues as a major mode of practice
and discourse between masters and disciples. Chan Buddhists used to define
middle Chan as a golden age of Chinese Buddhism by uncritically adopting the
expressions of Song dynasty Chan texts, which in some cases turned into
stereotypes.
Fourth, the major figures of Song dynasty Chan are Dahui (1089–1163), a
leader of the Linji school, and Hongzhi (1091–1157), a leader of the Caodong
school. Song dynasty Chan historians retrospectively depicted Tang dynasty Chan
masters in highly ritualized Song dynasty settings. The mature Song dynasty forms
of Chinese Chan Buddhism continued into the modern era without serious alterations. McRae described Song dynasty Chan as the greatest flourishing of Chan.
Even though Song dynasty Chinese Buddhism was basically ecumenical, it institutionally arranged Chan lineages over other doctrinal and vinaya lineages.
Reviews 113
Of the four stages that McRae introduced, Schlütter and Teiser’s Readings of
the Platform Sūtra is closely connected with the Dunhuang edition of the Platform
Sūtra, a key source for the second stage of Chinese Chan Buddhism. Modern
scholars in Chinese Chan Buddhism removed later additions from the sūtra’s
editions and reconstructed possible original forms of early Chinese Chan
­Buddhism through its earliest surviving Dunhuang edition.
The major editions of the Platform Sūtra, the key text that editors and contributors of this volume discuss, might have originated from three nonextant
editions: (1) the Dunhuang edition compiled by Fahai and/or other editors, circa
780; (2) the edition edited by Huixin in 967; and (3) the edition edited by Qisong
(1007–1072) in 1056. In length and content, the third edition was much larger and
more romanticized than the first and earliest edition. Through the careful investigation of the text’s various versions, modern scholars can also trace how Chinese
Chan Buddhism developed.
Two versions of the Dunhuang edition are currently available. First, Yabuki
Keiki (1879–1939) discovered in the British Museum collection (S 5435) in 1923 a
Dunhuang manuscript of the Platform Sūtra compiled circa 780 and made an
edited version that was finally included in the Taishō canon in 1928. D. T. Suzuki
(1870–1966), along with Kōda Rentarō (1874–1963), corrected various typographical mistakes in the Dunhuang edition based on the Kōshō-ji edition and published
a much better edition in 1934. Wing-tsit Chan (1901–1994) and Yampolsky each
produced a translation of the sūtra into English, in 1963 and 1967, respectively,
based on the Suzuki’s edition.
Even though scholars such as Chan, Peter N. Gregory, and Paul Groner
considered some portions in Yampolsky’s translation inadequate, researchers
should consider the translation to be epoch-making and regard it as being academically the best translation among the many. Scholars in Zen Buddhism have
widely referred to Yampolsky’s translation more often than Chan’s and Red Pine’s
(Bill Porter) translations of the Dunhuang edition, as well as numerous other
translations of the Zongbao edition. The contributors to Readings of the Platform
Sūtra also adopt Yampolsky’s translation as a major reference and develop arguments in their chapters.
Second, Zhou Shaoliang (1917–2005) discovered another version of the
­Dunhuang edition in the archives of the Dunghuang County Museum (no. 77) and
introduced it to modern scholars in 1986. Ren Ziyi originally discovered the
manuscript at the Shangsi Temple in the Dunhuang caves in 1935. Even though
Xiang Da reported the discovery in an article in 1950, the version had been
neglected for a long time. Yang Zengwen (b. 1939) annotated and published the
version in 1993. Through this manuscript, more readable than the earlier discovered manuscript (S 5475), scholars are able to minimize many typographical and
content mistakes in the Dunhuang edition. Red Pine translated and published the
version in English in 2006.
114 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
The various versions of the second and third editions are as follows. The major
versions that originated from the second Huixin edition include a version edited
most likely from 1031 and preserved at the Kōshō-ji Temple of the Rinzai Zen sect
in Kyoto, Japan, and a version found at the Daijō-ji Temple of the Sōtō Zen sect in
Kanazawa, Japan. The main versions derived from the third Qisong edition are the
version edited by Deyi in 1290, and continuously reprinted in Korea, and the
version edited by Zongbao in 1291, continually reprinted in China.
After Wong Mou-lam’s English translation of the Platform Sūtra in 1930,
writers have continuously based their translations of the scripture on different
versions of the Zongbao edition. General readers preferred the beautiful English
translations of the later and longer orthodox Zongbao edition to Yampolsky’s
academic translation of the earlier and shorter Dunhuang edition. The later
­versions of the Zongbao edition seem much more fascinating than the earlier
versions of the Dunhuang edition to general readers in its style, format, and
content.
Each of the seven contributors to Readings of the Platform Sūtra heavily relies
upon the ground-breaking research and translation volume The Platform Sūtra of
the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of Tung-huang Manuscript (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1967) by Yampolsky. They widely cite its translation section and
discuss each theme in their respective chapters. While Yampolsky philologically
described the text and its content in his book, the contributors interpretively
analyze the text and its historical and philosophical background.
Yampolsky loyally incorporated textual research by Japanese scholars on Zen
Buddhism, such as Ui Hakuju (1882–1963), Iriya Yoshitaka (1910–98), and Yanagida
Seizan (1922–2006). He also critically reviewed studies by the renowned Chinese
positivist scholar Hu Shih (1891–1962) and extensively analyzed in his work a
Dunhuang edition of the Platform Sūtra (S 5435). Finally, he critically examined
the historical formation of the text and descriptively analyzed the text’s content.
Yampolsky referred to the works edited by Suzuki with Kōda and by Ui and to
the two versions of the Kōshō-ji edition, made his own version, and minimized
many typographical and content errors in his translation. When he analyzed the
Dunhuang edition, he academically deconstructed the biography of Huineng,
traditionally considered the founder of Chinese Chan Buddhism and the early
stage of Chinese Chan Buddhism, which modern Zen evangelists Suzuki and Alan
Watts (1915–1973) beautifully introduced and described for English readers.
The editors of and contributors to Readings of the Platform Sūtra incorporate
Yampolsky’s 1967 research, update it with recent Japanese scholarship developed
since the p
­ ublication, and approach the Platform Sūtra and its historical and
philosophical background from much broader perspectives. They are deeply
indebted to the academic accomplishments of two eminent Japanese scholars in
Zen Buddhism: Iriya Yoshitaka, a specialist in Tang colloquial language, and
Yanagida Seizan, an expert in Zen texts and history, as well as their students and
Reviews 115
junior scholars. This volume includes several chapters that successfully and meticulously examine early Chan, Huineng, and the Platform Sūtra.
Schlütter provides an overview of the Platform Sūtra and Chinese Chan
Buddhism, outlines the chapters of the volume, and guides readers to understand
the volume in the introduction chapter. John Jorgensen and Henrik H. Sørensen
examine Huineng, the major persona of the text, and the history and practice of
early Chan in the second and the third chapter, respectively. Gregory and Groner
respectively discuss the sudden teaching and the subitist ordination, two central
notions in the text, in the fourth and the sixth chapter. Wendi L. Adamek examines
the notions of transmission in the formation of the lineage system of early Chan
Buddhism in the fifth chapter. Finally, Brook Ziporyn discusses the sūtra and its
content in the context of early Chinese philosophy in the seventh chapter.
Whereas Yampolsky mainly referred to Chan texts and reconstructed the
biography of Huineng, Jorgensen extensively examines the topic from historical,
hagiographical, and political contexts and clearly explains how and why Huineng
became an appealing figure in Chinese and East Asian Chan Buddhism. Sørensen
extends research by Yampolsky that utilized mainly the Dunhuang manuscripts
and reconstructed the history and practice of early Chinese Chan Buddhism.
Unlike Yampolsky, who historically and textually discussed the lineage system of
early Chan, Adamek philosophically and interpretively examines the system.
Gregory, Groner, and Ziporyn, respectively, examine the sudden teaching, the
vinaya transmission, and the influences from early Chinese philosophy, important
themes of the Platform Sūtra, which Yampolsky did not detail in his work. Gregory
investigates how the scripture received influences from the Diamond Sūtra, the
Vimalakīrti Sūtra, and the Awakening of Faith and examines the doctrinal background of the scripture’s sudden teaching. Groner outlines the subitist ordination
and the formless precepts central to the scripture. Ziporyn discusses a number of
philosophical themes, deeply rooted in traditional Chinese thought, such as
worldliness, the philosophy of change, the purity of human nature, and the cate­
gories of substance and function.
Editors and contributors make a tremendous effort to minimize some contradictory arguments with some interconnections among the chapters. However, the
volume inevitably includes some contradictory arguments, different methodologies, and overlaps among chapters, since its chapters come from different contributors, unlike the work of the single author Yampolsky, who consistently and
coherently discussed the Platform Sūtra and early Chan. For example, some
disagreements among contributors on the text’s authorship and the translation of
Chinese text titles in English are not settled, and some repetitious explanations of
early Chan are easily found in the volume.
Even so, I enthusiastically recommend this invaluable and well-organized
volume along with The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch, originally published
in 1967 by Yampolsky and republished in 2012 with a new foreword by Schlütter
116 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
and an updated glossary. Contributors to Readings of the Platform Sūtra shed light
on the depth of Yampolsky’s accomplishments and successfully examine some
important themes that he did not discuss.
Chanju Mun
Chanju Mun is a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa,
specializing in East Asian Buddhism.
Shen Fu. Six Records of a Life Adrift. Translated with an introduction and
notes by Graham Sanders. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2011. 148 pp.
Paperback $13.95, isbn 978-1-60384-198-6.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
A colleague recently asked for suggestions for a book to use in an introductory
creative writing course in which students would meet for two hours a week during
the semester and then spend two weeks in Taiwan visiting cultural sites and
attending lectures about comparative cultural studies at the National University of
Tainan. This was her first venture into teaching literature in translation, and she
wanted a book that would give her students access to traditional or “ancient”
Chinese literature. Ideally, she mused, the book would fit the travel writing theme
of her course. I happened to have a copy of Graham Sanders’s translation of Shen
Fu’s Six Records of a Life Adrift, which includes a chapter on the author’s pleasure
trips, and I opened it to a passage where Shen Fu reflects on the death of Chen
Yun, his wife and soul mate: “And Yun is now shattered jade and buried incense”
( p. 46). With those words, my colleague had found her book.
Six Records of a Life Adrift is an intimate account of the personal life of a lower
gentry poet, painter, and private secretary in late imperial China. Shen Fu led an
“unremarkable, unfulfilled, and itinerate life” ( p. ix), yet he left behind a portrait
that has been described as the “essence of a Chinese way of life as really lived by
two persons who happened to be husband and wife” (Lin, p. 965). The story of the
book itself is told in Sanders’s long introduction ( p. viii–xv). The six records are
actually four in number, and at one point, the book was “set adrift on a sea of old
books only to come to light” in a secondhand book stall in Suzhou “sixty years
after it was written” ( p. ix). The author and his work are vagabonds, both remarkable and rambling, by turns deep and appreciative, intriguing yet distant. The four
records, “Delights of Marriage,” “Charms of Idleness,” “Sorrows of Hardship,” and
“Pleasures of Roaming,” weave a complex tale that invites engagement on many
levels. Six Records of a Life Adrift is not family centered, yet concerns with filial
Reviews 117
piety and other familial matters are always in play. The book is autobiographical
but not chronological, as narrative episodes in the author’s life are told and retold
in different sections. Yet the parallelism in the titles of the six records suggests a
kind of unity based on emotion or sentiment. Shen Fu is the protagonist, but his
wife is arguably the more developed character. At times, Shen Fu and Chen Yun
live a life of privilege, but at many other times they are desperately poor. They
never lose sight of life’s simple pleasures, and, as readers, we never lose sight of
their commitment to each other. Even after Chen Yun suffers heartbreak when a
courtesan she desired is taken away by a wealthy merchant, and thus Chen Yun is
never given the opportunity to develop a relationship among the three of them, we
never doubt the depth of Shen Fu and Chen Yun’s love for each other. We cannot
be certain if Chen Yun desired the courtesan for herself or if she desired to please
her husband. The emotional ambiguity adds romantic intimacy.
Sanders’s translation is the first to appear in almost thirty years, and it is the
richest and most comprehensive of the three other English-language versions that
are available. In comparing just the first paragraph of Sanders’s translation to earlier
versions by Lin Yutang (“Six Chapters of a Floating Life”) and Leonard Pratt and
Chiang Su-hui’s (Six Records of a Floating Life), we can see the decisions translators
must make in order to arrive at both a faithful and a satisfying version of the
original story. We can also see that Sanders is well on his way to accomplishing his
workmanlike goals of correcting errors, expanding annotations, and rendering
“Shen Fu’s account into a more colloquial and flowing style of English” ( p. vi).
Lin Yutang’s version and then Pratt and Chiang’s version follow:
I was born in 1763, under the reign of Ch’ienlung, on the twenty-second day of
November. The country was then in the heyday of peace and, moreover, I was
born in a scholars’ family, living by the side of Ts’anglang Pavilion in Soochow. So
altogether I may say the gods have been unusually kind to me. Su Tungp’o said:
“Life is like a spring dream which vanishes without a trace.” I should be ungrateful
to the gods if I did not try to put my life down on record. (Lin Yutang 1942, p. 968)
I was born in the winter of the 27th year of the reign of the Emperor Chien Lung,
on the second and twentieth day of the eleventh month. It was a time of great
peace and plenty, and my family was an official one that lived next to the Pavilion
of the Waves in Soochow. As the poet Su Tung-po wrote, “All things are like
spring dreams, passing with no trace. If I did not have a record of that time, I
would be ungrateful for the blessings of Heaven.” (Pratt and Chiang 1983, p. 24)
The Sanders translation follows:
On December 26, 1763, in the twenty-eighth year of the Qianlong reign, I was
born during a time of great peace and prosperity into a scholarly family living by
the Pavilion of Azure Waves in the city of Suzhou, so one might say that Heaven
has been very generous to me.
But as the poet Su Shi once wrote, “The past is a spring dream that fades
without a trace,” so if I do not record my story with brush and ink, then truly I
would be turning my back on Azure Heaven’s generosity. ( p. 1)
118 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
The translation decisions are staggering. All three passages convey the same
information differently, not just lyrically (ungrateful to the gods/ungrateful for
the blessings of Heaven/turning my back on Azure Heaven’s generosity) but
grammatically and structurally as well. Even the name of the poet is unsettled.
Fortunately, nearly every other page in Sanders’s translation has explanatory
footnotes (including half of the first page), but more important, nearly every page
also brings metaphors and imagery that will delight readers versed in the Western
literary tradition. Some conventional passages are cleverly expressed, such as Shen
Fu’s self-deprecating caution in the introduction that looking for “skill” in his
“composition” is like demanding “light from a filthy mirror” ( p. 1), but it is the
linguistically and culturally colorful expressions, the references to ghostly spirits
and pleasure gardens, drinking games and geomancy, memorial pavilions and
courtesy names that confound and frustrate and charm and resonate.
Six Records of a Life Adrift does not have Chinese characters, but pinyin is in
the footnotes, and the origins and influences of many passages are referenced
throughout. The book could be used in any number of courses, in addition to
being a required reading for courses on imperial China. Six Records of a Life Adrift
would be appropriate for gender studies courses, world literature, comparative
literature, and, of course, creative writing. The brilliance of Shen Fu as a writer and
Graham Sanders as a translator is nowhere more evident than in the scene describing Chen Yun’s final moments. After alluding to her untimely demise several times,
Shen Fu presents her passing in a beautiful passage of lachrymose prose. His grief
is real. We experience his sadness. Next fall, my colleague’s creative writing students
will be hard pressed to find such stunningly tender and emotionally exhausting
writing, in any language.
Joe Sample
Joe Sample is an assistant professor of English specializing in genre and rhetoric
studies.
References
Lin Yutang, trans. 1942. “Six Chapters of a Floating Life, by Shen Fu.” In The Wisdom of China and
India. New York: Random House.
Pratt, Leonard, and Su-hui Chiang, trans. 1983. Six Records of a Floating Life, by Shen Fu. New
York: Penguin Press.
Reviews 119
Scott Snyder. China’s Rise and the Two Koreas: Politics, Economics, Security.
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009. 241 pp. Hardcover $57.00,
isbn 978-1-58826-618-7. Paperback $22.50, isbn 978-1-58826-622-4.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
The rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to global economic prominence
and regional if not global geostrategic significance is a phenomenon that has
attracted the attention of numerous observers and policymakers. Scott Snyder’s
timely volume explores the implications of China’s rise for both the Republic of
Korea (ROK), or South Korea, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(DPRK), or North Korea. His observations and conclusions will be of great interest
to international relations scholars and practitioners alike.
Snyder’s impressively slim volume begins with an introduction that surveys
various theoretical explorations and predictions of relations between the PRC and
the two Koreas. His laconic conclusion that these relations are “far more complex
and nuanced than the options anticipated by the major schools of international
relations theory” ( p. 12) is well taken and amply demonstrated in subsequent
chapters. Snyder also clearly articulates one of the overarching themes of the book
(as expressed in the preface), “the interrelationship of economic interdependence
and political leverage” ( p. ix). The next three chapters survey the dramatic shifts in
relations between the PRC and the ROK in both the economic and political realms
as China and South Korea moved from limited trade and mutual nonrecognition
to normal diplomatic relations and ever-growing levels of trade and investment.
Chapter 5 covers the same chronological territory for relations between the PRC
and the DPRK, chronicling the shift from a close alliance relationship to one in
which the PRC attempts to maintain equidistance between itself and both Koreas
while remaining the DPRK’s most significant source of aid and support. Chapter 6
is a fascinating examination of the competing agendas, priorities, and dilemmas
faced by the PRC as it seeks to promote its interests vis-à-vis North Korea. Based
primarily on interviews with China-based analysts, it constitutes an illuminating
examination of both the complexity of Chinese foreign policy analysis (if not
decision making) and the surprising diversity of opinions within China regarding
its North Korean neighbor. The next two chapters demonstrate that Snyder’s
ambition and grasp exceed the China-and-the-two-Koreas’ parameters implied by
the book’s title. Snyder explores the changing dynamics of the China–South
Korea–United States Security Triangle (chapter 7) as well as the role of the Korean
peninsula in the abiding and ongoing Sino-Japanese rivalry (chapter 8). Finally, he
concludes with an assessment of the implications of the past two decades of
changes for Northeast Asian security more generally.
This book is fascinating, illuminating, and thought provoking and should be
required reading for anyone interested in contemporary Northeast Asian international relations, Chinese foreign and economic policy, as well as the foreign and
economic policies of the two Koreas. One impressive aspect of the book is the
120 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
richness of its detail, all the more impressive given the sweeping scope and relative
brevity of the book. Important events and anecdotes — the 1985 torpedo diplomacy
of the PRC and the ROK, the 1992 Operation East Sea (the South Korean code
name for the ROK-PRC normalization negotiations), the 2001 controversy surrounding the ROK treatment of alleged Tiananmen dissident Xu Bo, the 2004
takeover of Ssangyong Motors by the Shanghai Automotive Investment Corporation (SAIC), the 2005 incident in which ROK National Assembly members found
the power to their Beijing press conference cut by Chinese agents, and the 2007
blunt declaration of DPRK vice minister Kim Kye Gwan that North Korea sought
better relations with the United States in part to counterbalance growing Chinese
power (and this list is but the tip of the iceberg) — effectively illustrate the changing
nature of the relations in the region and demonstrate Snyder’s keen eye and extensive knowledge and experience.
Many of Snyder’s conclusions are noteworthy as well. He cogently argues that
while economic interests, particularly the anticipation of future trade benefits, may
have motivated both the ROK and the PRC to improve their bilateral relations, the
increased economic interdependence has not translated into increased Chinese
political leverage. The same goes for the PRC-DPRK relationship. Since the DPRK
recognizes that Chinese aid to North Korea is primarily motivated by a desire to
avoid the destabilizing effects of a North Korean collapse, it feels little to no obligation to cooperate with China on political matters such as the North Korean
nuclear weapons program. This is an important point that has been apparently lost
by successive American administrations who repeatedly claim that China holds
the key to changing North Korean behavior.
Snyder also presciently noted that despite the depths of the South Korean
China fever in the 1990s and early 2000s, disputes over history (the Koguryŏ/
Gaogouli debate) and growing South Korean fears of increasingly effective Chinese
economic competition caused South Korea to begin to hedge against a rising
China by seeking to maintain or even improve political and economic ties with the
United States (as manifested in the US–ROK Free Trade Agreement that was
ratified years after Snyder finished the book). Finally, he repeatedly observes that
most of the great powers interested in Korea — China, Japan, and the United
States — have actually found the status quo of a divided Korea to be preferable to
the potentially destabilizing nature of a unified Korea (which would likely have to
choose between China and the U.S.-Japan alliance; as things now stand, both
China and the U.S.-Japan coalition find their interests protected by their relations
with one of the two Koreas). This conclusion will doubtless fuel the fires of those
Koreans who see a conspiracy of foreign interests that have sought to divide Korea
at least since the nineteenth century (if not since the sixteenth-century era of the
Hideyoshi invasions), but it is worth making, nonetheless.
As noted previously, the ambitious scope and brevity of the book constitute
some of its key strengths. However, these characteristics are often double-edged.
Reviews 121
Snyder consistently portrays the state actors — China, South Korea, North
Korea — as monolithic entities whose decisions and policies are apparently made
by objective (but almost entirely faceless) statesmen who survey the various
interests — political, economic, security — from Olympian heights and decide on
priorities and enact policy accordingly. Of course, actual policy making, particularly in more open political systems such as the ROK (and Japan and the United
States) is seldom so simple. A variety of actors, whose interests often diverge,
influence and implement policy, sometimes in tandem, sometimes at cross-­
purposes. This is arguably the case even in more authoritarian regimes such as the
PRC and the DPRK. But aside from the occasional oblique reference (such as that
found on page 128), this diversity is downplayed in favor of a simple, straight­
forward description of China wanting this, North Korea seeking that, and the like.
This characteristic of China’s Rise and the Two Koreas is particularly salient in
the area of the influence of economic factors and motivations on policy. Snyder
concludes, and rightly so, that economic influence has not resulted in greater
Chinese influence over political matters on the Korean peninsula. But the underlying assumption of his examination and analysis is that Chinese statesmen pursued
the economic policies they did at least in part with the intention of increasing
political leverage. This may have been the case, but sometimes economic motives
are sufficient in and of themselves to explain the pursuit of a regime that favors
greater levels of trade, investment, and integration. One wonders whether the
Chinese businesses that have profited immensely from the enhanced PRC-ROK
relationship actually worry too much about the apparent lack of concomitant
political influence their economic activities were supposed to generate.
More generally, the focus on economic motives on the part of China and the
two Koreas seems to presume that these motives work in essentially the same way
in a liberal democracy with an open-market economy (the ROK), a rapidly growing market-authoritarian regime (the PRC), and a still primarily closed-market
totalitarian dictatorship (the DPRK). If this were actually the case, this would be
cause for fundamental revision of our understanding of political economy and
state-society relations.
Snyder also could have been more transparent about the different types of
sources used for his analysis of the various actors. His extensive use of interviews
of Chinese researchers is fascinating but would have been even more compelling
had he more clearly demonstrated the ways in which said researchers understand
or perhaps even influence actual PRC policy at the government level. The Chinese
sources contrast with the more openly available South Korean policy makers and
diplomats but even more dramatically with North Korea where researchers,
diplomats, and policy makers simply are not available for interview by American
analysts. Both the author and the reader might very well come to essentially the
same conclusions about the changing nature of Northeast Asian relations, but the
potential limitations of the source base might be cause for a bit more caution.
122 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Finally, some aspects of the inter-Korea relationship perhaps could use more
acknowledgment and development. For example, Snyder repeatedly notes the
North Korean reluctance to adopt Chinese-style economic reforms (even after
Kim Jong-il’s famous 2006 southern tour of China’s most prosperous region).
While it is likely that this reluctance stems, at least in part, from the fear of the
potentially destabilizing impact of economic liberalization (P’yŏngyang paid close
attention to what happened in both Beijing and Bucharest in 1989), it is also worth
considering whether North Korea recognizes the influence of South Korea as
inspiration and model for China’s economic reforms (as Snyder notes), making its
resistance all the more steadfast and understandable. In addition, Snyder appears
to assume that all South Koreans have consistently longed for unification (he is
fairly silent on the opinion of North Koreans on this matter). However, one motivation for the sunshine policy of engagement with North Korea implemented by
Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun is arguably the desire to defer unification to a
distant future (if at all). Hence, while some diplomats in the Kim Young Sam
administration may have chafed at what they perceived as the Chinese prevention
of unification in the mid-1990s, at least some South Koreans in the 2000s may
have actually welcomed Chinese aid and intervention in the DPRK, as it would
presumably avert a North Korean collapse and the social and economic costs of a
rapid German-style unification.
None of these observations and objections should be taken as an indication of
any serious flaw or shortcoming of the book. China’s Rise and the Two Koreas
should be destined to be required reading for many years to come.
Kirk W. Larsen
Kirk W. Larsen is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University,
specializing in modern Korea, modern China, and Northeast Asian foreign relations.
Kenneth M. Swope. A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China
and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xxiv, 398 pp. Hardcover $34.95,
isbn 978-0-8061-4056-8.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
A few years ago, I assigned my students a couple of chapters from Ray Huang’s
classic 1587: A Year of No Significance along with Kenneth Swope’s article in The
Journal of Military History titled “Crouching Tigers, Secret Weapons: Military
Reviews 123
Technology Employed during the Sino-Japanese-Korean War, 1592–1598.” As we
kicked off our seminar on the military history of the Ming, one student sheepishly
raised his hand and said: “I’m a little confused. Are these guys talking about the
same Ming dynasty?” That comment cut to the heart of Kenneth Swope’s achievement in that earlier article and anticipated the pathbreaking accomplishment that
is the book under review here. Almost single-handedly, Swope has fundamentally
transformed our understanding of the late Ming. Rather than Huang’s moribund
state, tottering toward inevitable collapse and overseen by a venal and distracted
Wanli emperor, Swope gives us a dynamic and militarily muscular Ming ruled by
an active and intensely engaged Wanli. The ultimate test of Ming military prowess
and of Wanli’s leadership was the epic war over the fate of Korea, an immense
effort that consumed the last decade of the sixteenth century. However, this book
is much more than just a reinterpretation of China’s role in that conflict. Swope has
dived into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese sources on this war and, as a result, gives
us a view of the motivations and actions of all of the belligerents.
Swope has astonishing gifts as a scholar and as a writer. This book is not
merely a great work of history; it is a great work of storytelling that will invariably
invite comparison to Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The
Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World. It is a gripping
account of perhaps the greatest war of the sixteenth century — commonly called
the Imjin War — a conflict that involved some of the most iconic figures in Asian
history, including the much-maligned Ming emperor Wanli, the Japanese warlord
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, as well as King Sonjo of Korea and his great admiral Yi
Sun-sin. This is a great history of a pivotal conflict that continues to shape attitudes
and politics in Asia to our own day. And yet for all of the gripping descriptions of
campaigns and battles, Swope also delves into the minutiae of military planning
and diplomacy. In the process, he shows us how all of the belligerents, but especially the Ming, dealt with the aspects of war.
There is an old saw that “amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.” Swope shows that this was very much the case for the Ming. This is in no
small part due to the fact that one of this book’s main sources for the Chinese side
of the war is the correspondences of Song Yingchang, Wanli’s chief logistician in
the early phase of the Korean conflict. While the Ming was strategically surprised
by the Japanese invasion and distracted by other military commitments, Song’s
correspondence shows just how professional and competent the Ming military was
when it came to mobilizing for and waging war on the scale required to rescue
their Korean ally. Taking his cues from William H. McNeill’s The Age of Gunpowder Empires, 1450–1800 and Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution: Military
Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, Swope shows how Ming China was
uniquely able to embrace the gunpowder revolution and equip its large army with
both mass-produced small arms and, especially, cannon, a Chinese forte. The
124 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
modernization of the Ming and Korean militaries only accelerated in the course
of this protracted war. On reflection, this should come as little surprise, given the
high level of military activity in the late Ming. In fact, monumental problems of
supply proved to be one of the critical vulnerabilities of the Japanese strategy.
While logistics were never an easy task for the Sino-Korean allies, their superior
supply systems probably turned the tide. On this topic, Swope raises a provocative
contrast between the bureaucratic approach to war, embraced by the Chinese and
Koreans, and the heroic emphasis of the Japanese accounts recorded by daimyo
and their samurai retainers. The fact that the Ming military commanders were also
fastidious record keepers and active correspondents explains why Swope has so
much Chinese material with which to work, but also raises serious questions about
why the military dimensions of this struggle have attracted so little attention,
heretofore, in the field of Ming history. Fortunately, Swope and a new generation
of Chinese military historians have begun to correct this oversight.
As adept as he is in showing his readers just how impressive the Ming military
was, Swope is equally clear on how well officials like Li Rusong, Song Yingchang,
and Emperor Wanli understood the limits of Ming power. While far from fiscally
debilitating, the Ming war effort was very costly, and after King Sonjo’s throne was
saved in 1593, the Ming started to draw down their forces and tried to figure out
how to negotiate a peace that would nearly meet Chinese objectives. They were
equally concerned with implementing aid and advisory packages to ensure the
long-term security of Korea. In fact, what we have here is a six-year war, punctuated at the beginning and end by periods of intense combat, separated by protracted and indecisive negotiations. Those negotiations were characterized by
diplomatic and political intrigue, including misinformation and flat-out mendacity
between and within the two warring camps. At the same moment that the Chinese
were looking for an early exit, some of the Japanese commanders, realizing that
outright conquest of China was not militarily feasible, signaled a willingness to
negotiate. Apparently, unbeknown to Hideyoshi, commanders in the field shifted
the stated objectives from conquering Korea and China to trading portions of
occupied Korea for a formal Ming recognition of Hideyoshi as king of Japan and a
modified form of tributary status for the Japanese state. Against the advice of many
in Ming officialdom, Wanli formally invested Hideyoshi in 1595, albeit in dismissive language that infuriated the Japanese warlord. Hideyoshi wanted submission,
not condescension. Thus, for all of their activism and furious correspondence, the
three rulers involved rarely had a particularly clear idea of conditions on the
ground or of the actions of their enemies and even of their subordinates. Nowhere
was this more the case than with the peace negotiations that consumed much of
the period from 1594 to 1597. Swope’s recounting of the machinations of these often
self-serving and dishonest negotiators, bargaining over the fates of empires, reads
like a comic opera and counterposes his great skill as a diplomatic historian with
his abundant talents for military history. His readers are also treated to front-row
Reviews 125
seats for the bitter political infighting between the Chinese and Korean allies and
also within the Ming senior leadership, riven by factions and long-standing personal grievances. This is a rich treatment of the strains of war on the already
strained institutions of the state.
The mishandled negotiations resulted in another Japanese invasion of Korea
in 1597, but in this instance the Chinese and Koreans were far better prepared for
the fight on land and especially at sea. The truly remarkable naval dimension of
this war will startle readers who assume that Asian and, particularly, Chinese
maritime prowess dropped off permanently after the fifteenth-century voyages of
Zheng He. While the Koreans, especially under Admiral Yi Sun-sin, held their own
against the Japanese in the first phase of the war, the naval war of 1597–1598 was
won by a joint Sino-Korean fleet combining both skill and mass. Ming success at
sea and in amphibious operations was also based on the hard-won experience
from the second Wokou crisis of the late sixteenth century, in which the dynasty
leveraged both a large oceangoing population and a robust shipbuilding infrastructure. Early in the Korean war, Ming commanders realized that they held the
advantage in naval warfare while the Japanese were more proficient at land warfare, an ironic observation given that Japan is an island nation and China a continental power. Chinese naval power bought the Ming precious time and was a
critical enabler in the war itself. Hideyoshi was never able to deploy sufficient naval
forces to expand the war to include attacks on China’s northern and southern ports,
or to harass Chinese maritime trade. In other words, Ming naval power prevented
Hideyoshi from isolating the theater of war and from denying the Chinese the
money and means to wage war and to supply their Korean allies. In the final naval
engagement of the Imjin War, the Battle of Noryang Strait in December of 1598, a
combined Sino-Korean force of 150 ships and over 20,000 men routed, through
superior seamanship and gunnery, a larger Japanese force and completely wrecked
the Japanese attempts to withdraw their forces intact from the peninsula. A century and a half after Zheng He’s last voyage, Ming China still ruled the seas.
My only substantive criticism of this outstanding work may be an unfair one.
Even with the scope and sweep of events that this book covers, I would have liked
to see Swope do more to compare and contrast the institutions and war-making
abilities of China, Japan, and Korea to the other “gunpowder empires” of the
pre­modern era. In particular, given the near simultaneity of the Imjin War of the
1590s to the war between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans that also culminated in
a great naval battle, at Lepanto in 1571, this reader would like to know how these
Asian states, especially the Ming, would have stacked up militarily against their
Western counterparts. One can only hope that Swope or some historian inspired
by this book will take up that challenge.
Relying on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese primary sources and the finest
secondary scholarship, Kenneth M. Swope provides a multidimensional history of
what he labels “the First Great East Asian War.” Those inclined to accuse Swope of
126 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
hyperbole on this point will first be silenced by the scale of the military conflict he
recounts, and second be impressed by his sketch of the long-term implications of
the Imjin War. He chooses his title, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tale, from an
old Chinese saying used by the Japanese suggesting an enterprise that begins
grandly but has no clear resolution. This is a particularly apt choice for a great
work of scholarship about an epic war whose legacies still linger more than five
hundred years after the fact.
Andrew R. Wilson
Andrew R. Wilson is a professor of strategy and policy at the United States Naval
War College who specializes in Chinese strategic thought, Chinese maritime history,
and the history of the Chinese diaspora from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Zhijian Tao. Drawing the Dragon: Western European Reinvention of China.
Berlin: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. 233 pp. Paperback $73.95,
isbn 978-3-03911-812-0.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
The frontispiece in Drawing the Dragon: Western European Reinvention of China
illustrates a critical conundrum that is very much a part of all efforts to understand
and represent other peoples from other places. The frontispiece shows a Chinese
long (龍) in front of a mirror. The image reflected in the mirror, however, looks
nothing like the 龍 and, in fact, it is a mean-spirited caricature of a 龍 that originally appeared in an issue of Punch in 1860. According to Tao Zhijian, the dragon
in the mirror is representative of “the popular Victorian conception of China and
the Chinese: slant-eyed, pigtailed, malicious, cowardly” ( p. 184). The frontispiece
embodies a complex cross-cultural problem: a 龍 is not a dragon but without a
sustained cross-cultural dialogue, which Tao calls for in the conclusion, the 龍 and
the dragon will continue to be viewed as one and the same. And if that is the case,
then the “dragonization of China” ( pp. 21, 213) in the West is bound to continue.
The arguments found in Drawing the Dragon are not flawed but the depth of
the problem inherent in “drawing the dragon,” or depicting Chinese social and
cultural institutions responsibly, is also not quite realized. Tao looks at Englishlanguage texts in which Western writers, including Leibniz, Hegel, Goldsmith,
Coleridge, and De Quincey, among others, made an effort to interpret things
Chinese, or they employed the idea of China for their own rhetorical purposes.
“China,” in these latter instances, typically serves only as a mirror or a backdrop
Reviews 127
for the writer to address concerns much closer to home. Tao looks at the works
through a lens of Orientalism, and, in doing so, he repeatedly, though not systematically, shows that there are indeed familiar colonizing schemes and tropes in
Western representations of China and the Chinese. Dennis Porter’s essay “Orientalism and Its Problems” (1993) served as the ideological exigence for writing
Drawing the Dragon: that is, according to Tao, Porter proposes examining the
“feasibility of a textual dialogue between Western and non-Western cultures”
( p. 26) as a means to come up with alternative critical paradigms to the ones
offered by Edward Said in Orientalism. Tao sees his work as starting that dialogue,
but he takes a rather aggressive stance in defense of Said and uses Porter as something of a rhetorical straw man in the process.
Drawing the Dragon might be seen as trying to wedge its way into conversations found in works such as Harold Isaacs’s Scratches on Our Minds: American
Views of China and India (1958), Raymond Dawson’s The Chinese Chameleon: An
Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (1967), Jonathon Spence’s
The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (1998), and David Porter’s
Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (2001). But Drawing the
Dragon will not achieve the permanence of these other studies. For one, Tao
conflates the informal and rhetorical use of the idea of China and the formal or
professional academic study of China. The process of cultural translation is
deemed “a disastrous one” ( p. 20). In addition, the chapters have a cobbledtogether feel and the larger argument in the introduction and conclusion does not
emerge or carry through well in the individual chapters. Tao limits his study to
“influential thinkers and men of letters,” and he focuses on individuals “from the
eighteenth century to the Opium Wars,” justifying the inclusion of Mandeville and
Derrida as a “historical lead” and an intellectual and historical “prospect” ( p. 52),
respectively. The lack of a strong conceptual framework is evidenced in the stumbling justification that “an exhaustive treatment” of the subject would require “the
examination of an indefinite amount of texts” ( p. 51). If there is an indefinite
number of potential texts one will never be able to produce an exhaustive study.
Tao approaches the subject of each chapter from a sociohistorical perspective,
and the individuals under investigation are all found to have used the idea of
China in an inexpert manner and therefore reinforced stereotypical perceptions,
or they simply misunderstood certain aspects of Chinese culture and society. In
both cases, the resulting representations are self-interested, lack nuance, and
share rhetorical features with more traditional representations of colonized
­others. The discussions of the primary texts are largely summaries that lead Tao
to conclude — often in the last sentence of a paragraph — that the writers under
investigation are guilty of committing acts of Orientalism, making the Western
encounter with China not substantively different from the Western encounters
with other “Others.” The inductive approach to stating his case means that lots
of ideas and pieces of evidence can be packed into a section or even a single
128 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
paragraph as Tao works up to his conclusion. This is not just an editorial statement
but also another way of saying that large passages throughout the study could have
been relegated to footnotes in order to allow the argument to emerge more forcefully. In fact, the author’s preference for interrupting phrases in his writing is an
indication that the study lacks a rigorous or cohesive critical perspective. That is,
in any given declarative statement, Tao tries to be as cautious and inclusive as
possible in acknowledging differing views, but that sensitivity and awareness is too
often distracting and stalls argumentative momentum that would otherwise propel
the reader though the book.
When Tao does assert himself, furthermore, there can at times be a sense of
vindictiveness in his tone, as though his investigation has exposed the writers who
are finally getting their comeuppance for producing such jaded representations of
China and the Chinese. This attitude is not limited to the historical works of
Chinese Orientalism. In the preface, for example, Tao recounts an episode in
which he discovered a photograph in a prominent Canadian newsmagazine of a
military soldier striking a Tibetan monk. The caption reads: “Butchers and monsters — Things we can never forget about Communist China” ( p. 9). But the photo
shows an “anti-Chinese protest” that was “crushed” in Nepal ( p. 9). What can we
make of this? It may be very careless journalism, but is it evidence of institutionalized Orientalism? The editors of the newsmagazine may have assumed that people
would read the entire article and process the words and the picture in context. In
other words, readers would take the time to learn what was being protested and
who was doing the crushing. But there is no discussion of the article, and instead
Tao asserts that this is yet another example of the “demonization, or monsterization of an Other nation” ( p. 9). Tao’s style and word choice virtually foreshadow his
conclusion: The photograph is in “THE Canadian weekly publication on current
affairs” ( p. 9). After “scrutinizing” the page, he “finally” finds the explanation of the
picture in the “least conspicuous corner” ( p. 9). He labels this “a fine piece of
commercial” ( p. 9), which itself should alert readers both to sentence-level problems and the conspiratorial attitude in the pages to follow.
The reason for including that particular example appears on the next page
where Tao acknowledges that it is “an extreme case” that he can dismiss as “born of
a cold-war mentality, ideological prejudice, belligerent political agenda, and
especially deliberate distortion” but that the “unsuspecting and undiscerning
public” may not be able to “brush off ” ( p. 10) so easily. What makes Tao more
capable of brushing off the supposed misrepresentation is somewhat problematic.
Like Said, Tao is also a “ ‘native informant’ and a ‘specular border intellectual’ ”
( p. 29). (The latter term is taken from Abdul R. JanMohamed’s chapter in Edward
Said: A Critical Reader.) But unlike Said, who “starts from a Middle-Eastern,
particularly Palestinian, perspective,” Tao starts from a Chinese perspective ( p. 29).
This imbues Tao with a subjectivity that allows him to recognize differences
Reviews 129
between “internal and external systems of knowledge” ( p. 31) — or at least this is
the point that I think Tao is making in a long and nuanced discussion about
cultural knowledge from experience (internal) and cultural knowledge from
observation (external). External knowledge is shaped by “perspectives, standards,
and traditions alien to the culture represented” ( p. 31). Tao labels this internal/
external distinction a “working concept,” but it seems to be more of a cognitive
conundrum that cannot really be resolved.
The unique historical circumstances that differentiate the Western encounter
with China from the Western encounter with other “Others” created a special
variety of Orientalism that can get the cultural dialogue started because of the
“internal ideological distanciation” ( p. 25) generated both toward the self and
toward Orientalism in general. (“Internal ideological distanciation” is apparently
Porter’s term for the mirror effect that can be generated when viewing the other.)
Tao finds “inadequacy” in Porter’s “internal alternatives to Orientalism,” and he
gets caught up in distinguishing between truths and representations and “raw”
versus “processed” realities ( pp. 25–35), all of which is a bit exhausting and seems
to point back to or assume advantages in Tao’s status as a native informant. The
premise that one studies the other to better understand the self, which (along with
reference to China) is the only theoretical concept that links the artifacts of
encounter in the book, gets shortchanged.
Part of the Peter Lang Euro-Sinica series, Drawing the Dragon has some
bothersome editing issues. The primary sources are listed in a bibliography but not
alphabetized, and Tao sometimes uses more than one citation method on a single
page. In addition, one too often finds odd phrasing ( page 18: “these two are as like
as chalk and cheese”), quirky expressions ( page 24: “imagination transmogrifies
itself into systems of knowledge”), and sentences with troubling syntax ( page 194:
“To sum up with a hard fact, which is Pound and Fellonosa’s topic, suffice it to
point out that Chinese poems from the first poem in the Book of Songs”) or even
incomplete sentences ( page 188: “In the hierarchy of the binary oppositions,
among which not the least is the concept of being as presence and nonbeing as
absence”). There is a gotcha rhetorical approach in the writing that ends up
­demonstrating how hard it is to avoid being taken in by the joke. Readers both
then and now recognize that Oliver Goldsmith is aware of his ignorance and
“knows” that the Chinese, for example, do not speak only in metaphor. In choosing to scold Goldsmith for reiterating a stereotype we risk ignoring the situated
commentary he is making about the ignorance of his readers then. Tao acknowledges the importance of understanding works in their original contexts, yet in his
pursuit to prove the existence of an “alternative canon to the ‘Orientalist’ discourse
in the European tradition” ( p. 154) he too often finds himself trying to pin down
the intent of the author.
All efforts to represent the “Other” are subjective and situated and are therefore misrepresentations to one degree or another, and in calling for a sustained
130 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
dialogue, Tao is in effect making the case for greater self-awareness of the complexities of rhetorical discourses, especially in cross-cultural settings. Tao notices,
for instance, that written and visual images of “Others” “seem to fall into certain
patterns” ( p. 11). They do not always appear as “monsterization or demonization”
but “can also appear as zealous idealization, or anything in between or aside of,
these two extremes” ( p. 11). But if everything counts, then the focus should not be
on the form but on the action it is used to accomplish, and on this point we can
return to the frontispiece and turn the mirror toward the author. There are more
than sixty full-page Punch cartoons from the nineteenth century that Tao could
have included in Dragon the Dragon, and most of them are not as vile as the one
that appears in his study. Although it is accurate to state that the country and the
people of China are relentlessly pulled, patronized, and, well, punched in the pages
of Punch, it is also true that the image of the dragon used in the frontispiece was
cut out of a larger cartoon to make a point — clearly an act of “deliberate distortion”
( p. 10), to use Tao’s own words. (To his credit, the entire cartoon appears near the
end of the book.)
But the point that Tao is making is evidence of the very problem he is addressing when he notices that certain patterns recur in cross-cultural representations. It
is not altogether productive to pursue the intent of the writer/editor in cutting out
the picture, but it is useful to recognize that even though we are far removed from
the rhetorical situation that prompted a cartoonist to draw the dragon, we can
interpret and understand the drawing and its message immediately — more than
150 years removed from the circumstances that prompted the discourse. Images of
an ancient Roman soldier and a Chinese dragon still resonate as clearly today as
they did in 1860. Understanding how language works and why we respond to
symbols as we do is vital because, as Harold Isaacs pointed out more than fifty
years ago in the title of his book, as we encounter new situations we will continue
to draw from old scratches on our minds.
As a means to reflect again on the critical conundrum that shapes representation studies, one final glance in the mirror is in order. The elaborate design and
gilded frame suggests that the mirror is from the Baroque era, meaning a Victorian
cartoon appears in a Baroque-era artifact. Is placing a historically situated attitude
into an earlier “frame” or time period in order to make a point an effective rhetorical technique, or is it yet another “symptom of the cultural ideology of Orientalism” ( p. 12)? It is not necessary here to revisit arguments about the reading of
present values into past events, but it is important to note that the dragon was not
demonized in the late eighteenth century and the “monsterization” (9) of China
had not yet really taken hold. Yet the culturally and symbolically flawed frontispiece has a fantastic impact on readers because it reminds us that all representations result from and occur between “innocent ethnocentrism and hegemonic
Reviews 131
discourse,” and that, indeed, these are concerns that need to “be more thoroughly
studied” ( p. 12) because, even after all of these years, a dragon is still not a 龍.
Joe Sample
Joe Sample is an assistant professor of English specializing in genre and rhetoric
studies.
References
Dawson, Raymond. The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese
Civilization. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Isaacs, Harold. Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India. Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe, 1958/1980.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. “Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael
Sprinker. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992.
Porter, David. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2001.
Porter, Dennis. “Orientalism and Its Problems,” Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A
Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Spence, Jonathon. The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1998.
Tsai Suey-Ling 蔡穗玲. The Life of the Buddha: Woodblock Illustrated Books
in China and Korea. Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft,
Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 76. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012. 314 pp. 74 illustrations. Paperback €78.00,
isbn 978-3-447-06621-1.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
The Life of the Buddha: Woodblock Illustrated Books in China and Korea offers
a thorough description and analysis of the illustrated books on the life of the
Buddha printed on woodblock in China and Korea. Each woodblock compilation
contains episodes on the life of the Buddha; most are followed by the subsequent
history of Buddhism in China. Each episode is accompanied by an illustration.
Tsai Suey-Ling, author of The Life of the Buddha, has identified eight different
compilations, three in China, one in Korea, and four in Japan. In this work, she
concentrates on the Chinese compilations, the earliest of which was completed in
1425, the latest in 1794 (and published in 1808).1
132 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
The initial Chinese compilation, the Shi shi yuanliu 釋氏源流 (The origin
and transmission of the Śākya’s House), was made by the monk Baocheng 寶成
­(Baocheng I) between 1422 and 1425. It contains four hundred pairs of illustrations
and text and is analyzed critically in the first chapter of the current book. A revised
version of Baocheng I (Baocheng II), discussed in the second chapter, was also
compiled by Baocheng, between 1434 and 1436. It contains 410 pairs of illustrations
and text. As shown by Tsai ( pp. 12, 138–142), it was probably the Buddhist monk
Zhiguang 智光, at that time, the great national preceptor (Da guoshi 大國師), who
had the contents changed, so that his role in Chinese Buddhism became acknowledged. Half a century later, a new edition was made under the auspices of the
Chinese emperor, with an imperial preface dated 1486. It contains the same four
hundred episodes as Baocheng I, but with a much changed layout. Calligraphy and
design were also changed. Chapter 3 of the book is devoted to this edition. Finally,
as discussed in chapter 4, at the end of the eighteenth century, a Manchu prince,
Yongshan 永珊, started a new compilation based on Baocheng II, the Shijia rulai
yinghua shiji 釋迦如來應化事蹟 (Events during and traces from the incarnation
of Tathāgata Śākya[muni]). It only contains the 208 episodes on the life of the
Buddha; it does not describe the history of Chinese Buddhism. In addition to the
four chapters, Tsai provides very useful appendices that compare the episodes of
the different compilations, as well as the titles of all episodes, and, most important,
the source texts of these ( pp. 248–290). This meticulous work forms a most useful
basis for any further research on Chinese Buddhist illustrated compilations. It is
very unfortunate, however, that no index has been provided.
The Life of the Buddha carefully and meticulously introduces the illustrated
compilations, starting with a critical overview of previous research ( pp. 15–19) and
a short but very useful terminology list ( pp. 23–24). Apart from clarifying the
relationships between the various compilations, editions, and impressions, many
more questions have been tackled: the artistic and historical aspects of the compilations, the history of illustrations, issues of Buddhist iconography, and the interdependence of woodblock illustrations and paintings. Tsai further investigates why
particular compilations, editions, or impressions were produced; under which
historical circumstances; and with what intentions of the makers. Although all
these questions are certainly most interesting, it might be a task too ambitious for
one single work to give satisfactory and detailed answers to all of them. At times,
the overwhelming quantity of data also seriously hampers the readability of the
text.
The first chapter is the most important. It introduces the subject and analyzes
the basic compilation, Baocheng I, in detail. First, we get a summary of all the
episodes, with a particular focus on the initial scenes, which are very well contextualized. We learn how Baocheng makes use of pseudo-Confucian, Daoist, and
apocryphal Buddhist texts to show how Buddhism was introduced in China, well
before the Common Era. This is a very interesting example of appropriation of
Reviews 133
texts and traditions ( pp. 58–71). Second, the Baocheng compilation is discussed in
detail with particular attention to the production process. Tsai hereby shows
convincingly how illustrated books were aiming at an audience that had the
political power to influence the state of Buddhism in the Chinese empire. These
books are, thus, to be seen as apologetic works ( pp. 97–104). Finally, Tsai also
devotes quite a lot of space in her work to a careful analysis of the ­pictorial strategy
and style of the illustrations, along with a short but interesting introduction to the
illustrator, Wang Gong 王恭 ( pp. 82–83). She directs our attention to the facial
expressions, gestures, and size of the figures and describes features of architecture
and furnishings. She offers an interesting and enjoyable perspective on Wang
Gong’s narrative skill in simultaneously presenting different sequences described
in the text. In addition, the many figures included in the book are most helpful in
understanding how text and illustration are perfectly matched in a unified
narrative.
While Tsai offers a good structure of the texts and illustrations — showing how
three aspects, an appeal to the politically powerful, the superiority of Buddhism
over Daoism and Confucianism, and an emphasis on Buddhist magical power,
continuously come to the foreground — many data mentioned in her work remain
difficult to grasp. Contextualization is often reduced to a minimum. For instance,
what is the exact impact of the concept of mofa 末法 in Chinese Buddhism, and
how is it related to the episodes ( p. 32)?2 Although the reader does receive a little
information, a more thorough treatment of the concept could have deepened the
reader’s understanding of Baocheng’s intentions. Equally, the compilations contain
a mass of fascinating information on donors offering money for new compilations
or editions, monastics and laypeople, male and female. But what exactly is their
role? Although Tsai certainly tries to give an initial analysis (see, for instance,
pp. 106–128), many more questions could have been raised, for instance: Who are
these donors? To what social classes do they belong? Would they spend equally on
other projects, Buddhist and others? Of course, answering such questions would
imply another study in its own right, which might go beyond the aims of the
present work. It shows, however, how rich the data are, and how difficult it is to
discuss and contextualize all of them.
Apart from some major issues, such as the mofa theory or the donors to the
monastery, which understandably could not be considered in detail, the present
work also refers to many smaller issues and data, which, in my opinion, could have
been contextualized in a more precise way. Particularly for readers less familiar
with Chinese or Buddhist history, many of these data will be hard to place, so that
their relevance to the topic becomes very unclear. Some well-structured information on the impact of theories of and events and persons in the Buddhist history of
China would certainly have enhanced the reader’s understanding of the content of
the episodes and illustrations mentioned in the book. What, for instance, is meant
by “five hindrances” ( p. 37)? What are the Northern Buddhist Canon and the
134 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Southern Buddhist Canon ( pp. 40–41)? To which tradition is the year of birth of
the Buddha, given in Baocheng I (1129 b.c.e.), linked ( p. 44)? Who are all those
representatives of various Chinese schools mentioned by Baocheng and how
important are they ( pp. 58–59)? Why are these representatives mentioned and
others not? Many names remain unexplained throughout the book. Some more
information on these names could have helped the reader to get a better grasp of
the choices made by Baocheng. Furthermore, in some cases, the little information
given on historical names or concepts does not take into account relevant research.
So, for instance, on page 78, the monk Huaihai (the dates mentioned by the author
are 720–814; more probable dates are 749–814) is represented as a monk who
established the disciplinary rules of the Chan school. However, although he is,
indeed, portrayed as such by the Chan tradition, the historical basis for this attribution is highly contested. While it cannot be denied that Huaihai might have had
some interest in monastic regulations for his monastery, none of the rules later
ascribed to him were unique. Rather, they testify to a growing demand for regulations applicable in large Chinese monasteries.3 Similarly, on page 99, a monastery
classified as lüzong 律宗 ( precept school) is defined as a monastery whose adherents emphasize the observation of precepts with the eventual aim of becoming a
Buddha. However, as clearly shown by Morten Schlütter in a discussion of Song
(tenth–thirteenth centuries) texts, lüzong 律宗 can just as well refer to hereditary
monasteries, as opposed to public monasteries. Only in cases in which it is made
very clear that the institution is public can the term lüzong be associated with the
Vinaya school.4 This aspect has been ignored in the present book.
The second to fourth chapters of Tsai’s work are devoted to additionally
revised or new compilations of woodblock illustrated books. In each chapter, great
care is devoted to the development of the compilation, and each time the first
edition, later editions, and impressions are discussed in detail. It brings the author
to a most interesting stemma that will remain a reference point for all future
research on illustrated books in China and Korea ( p. 242). Attention is also paid to
the aesthetic value of the illustrations and to Buddhist iconography. Tsai equally
provides an analysis of the production process that is very interesting and takes
into account the people behind it. One might wonder, for instance, why Baocheng
undertook the second compilation only a few years after he had finished his first
book. A detailed comparison of the texts and illustrations of Baocheng I and II
shows that the differences are not many, although some stand out. First of all, as
mentioned above, a much greater role is attributed to the monk Zhiguang, a
dominant figure in fifteenth-century esoteric Buddhism and the great national
preceptor, a title bestowed upon him by the emperor ( pp. 138–142). Another
change might point to some uneasiness or maybe criticism toward one scene in
Baocheng I describing an eccentric monk. It has been replaced by a more delicate
episode about Emperor Wen of the Sui dynasty becoming a Buddhist ( p. 147). Tsai
Reviews 135
describes the monk in a vivid way, thus giving the reader a good picture of how
text and illustration complement each other.
In summary, Tsai successfully offers a first comprehensive analysis and comparison of a most fascinating genre, the illustrated life of the Buddha and the
history of Buddhism. Her work is marked by the careful use of terms and source
material throughout the book. The relationships between the various compilations,
editions, and impressions are clearly indicated, thus offering a thorough, almost
encyclopedic, basis for any further research on illustrated compilations. Tsai’s
research puts an end to the confusion about the provenance and relationships of
the several extant illustrated books in China and, therefore, constitutes a most
valuable contribution to the history of Buddhism and Buddhist art. Equally, the
work contains an enormous amount of detail, revealing the didactic intentions of
the makers of these compilations, regarded as apologetic works aiming to prove
the superiority of Buddhism. This wealth of data, however, is also the weakness
of Tsai’s study. Many details have been left unexplained, hampering the readability
of the text. At times, contextualization is reduced to a minimum, and several
controversies remain unnoticed. In particular, readers less experienced in Chinese
Buddhist history might feel at a loss when confronted with lists of names or events
that are not easy to place and yet are necessary in order to grasp fully all the
intentions of the illustrated compilations. Nevertheless, the overall aim of the
compilations clearly comes to the fore, providing readers with a vivid insight into
late imperial Buddhist apologetics.
Ann Heirman
Ann Heirman is a professor of classical and Buddhist Chinese at Ghent University in
Belgium, specializing in studies on Buddhist disciplinary texts.
Notes
1. Research on the Korean compilation (fifteenth century), the first prose work written in
the Korean alphabet Han’gŭl, has been summarized ( pp. 19–20). The Japanese compilations
(seventeenth–nineteenth centuries) are not discussed.
2. The concept of mofa has repeatedly been used by Chinese emperors in an attempt to
control the Buddhist community. For a discussion, for instance, on how Emperor Wu of the
Liang dynasty (r. 502–549) used the concept to his advantage, see, in particular, Tom De Rauw,
“Beyond Buddhist Apology: The Political Use of Buddhism by Emperor Wu of the Liang
Dynasty” (PhD diss., Ghent University, 2008).
3. For a discussion, see, among many others, Jia Jinhua, “The Creation and Codification of
Monastic Regulations at Mount Baizhang,” Journal of Chinese Religions 33 (2005).
4. Morten Schlütter, “Vinaya Monasteries, Public Abbacies, and State Control of Buddhism
under the Song (920–1279),” in Going Forth: Visions of Buddhist Vinaya, ed. William M. Bodiford
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 136–160.
136 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
Wang Jun. Beijing Record: A Physical History of Planning Modern Beijing.
Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2011. 512 pp. Hardcover
$58.00, isbn 978-981-4295-72-7.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Beijing Record is the most detailed analysis to date of the transformation of
­Beijing’s urban form after the Communist Revolution. Wang Jun expertly weaves
together a political history of the debates surrounding planning decisions in the
1950s and 1960s with a biography of Liang Sicheng, probably China’s most important twentieth-century architect. He places this narrative within the context of
both the wider history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and international
trends. His sources include archival documents and interviews, and the latter in
particular allow the motivations of those involved to be explored to a depth that is
rare in histories of this period. Small wonder then, that since this book’s first
publication in Chinese in 2003, it has been reprinted numerous times and won
several awards. Its author is a Xinhua journalist who campaigns for cultural
preservation in Beijing and around the country.1 This means that, at times, the
narrative may seem a little polemical or sentimental. While some readers might
find the style unwieldy, this is more the fault of the translator than the author.
Nevertheless, this book will reward anyone interested in Beijing, the history of
planning in China, or simply the early days of the PRC.
Beijing Record begins with the recent destruction of several historical buildings, one of which played host to Sun Yatsen in 1912, and this introduces the
tensions between preservation and development in contemporary China, as well as
the problems rapid urban expansion can cause. Wang Jun uses these issues to
highlight the foresight of Liang Sicheng, whose plans for Beijing in the 1950s were
never implemented, to the detriment of the city as a whole. Despite the architect’s
failures, he is central to the history of planning in the city, and in returning to the
Republican period, the book begins to intertwine history and biography. Thus, we
learn that Liang studied at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to
China and eventually founding Qinghua University’s Department of Architecture.
Other people central to the development of Beijing include Chen Zhanxiang, an
urban planner who studied in the United Kingdom, who was to become one of
Liang’s closest colleagues. This background also connects Beijing to the history of
planning around the world. Particularly interesting are Japanese plans for the city
drawn up in 1938, which envisaged preserving the ancient center and building
new administrative areas in the suburbs ( pp. 53–59). It is somewhat ironic that
an invading power should seek to preserve historical Beijing intact, while the
­Communist government that was about to replace it seemed determined on its
destruction.
The debate over whether to redevelop the ancient heart of Beijing or create a
new administrative area for the government forms the subject of chapters 3 and 4.
They describe the proposal for urban development drawn up by Liang and Chen
Reviews 137
and chart the reasons it failed to be implemented. Although their ideas were at
odds with the advice of Soviet planners, some Chinese architects, and Mao himself, Wang Jun paints Liang Sicheng as a heroic figure, working to preserve as
much of ancient Beijing as possible. He was certainly not dogmatic in his beliefs,
but his position brought him into contact and conflict with political figures and
entrenched ideas on the nature of socialist construction. Wang Jun reprints a letter
from Liang to Zhou Enlai, describing how other Chinese architects criticized the
proposal, and notes that Liang’s critique of Soviet advisors was also seen as counter
to the “leaning to one side” policy then informing foreign relations ( pp. 126–131).
The failure of initial plans for redeveloping Beijing not only cost the city dearly, but
also had serious ramifications for Liang himself. As the narrative moves into the
mid-1950s, architecture and urban planning are interwoven ever more closely with
the political history of the era.
Liang’s contribution to Chinese urban form did not end with the failure of his
plans for Beijing development. Indeed, he was in part responsible for the popularity of dawuding, the temple-style concave roofs that now adorn many large buildings in China, although initially he was reluctant to promote them. Wang Jun uses
this controversy to tell the story of Liang’s changing views on architecture. These
moved from modernist leanings before 1949 to his acceptance of Soviet advice on
the idea of the national form, symbolized by dawuding atop high-rise Westernstyle structures, a feature that Liang was forced to accept in place of more recognizably Chinese façades. Despite the initial popularity of dawuding, criticism of
the style was led by Mao himself, as well as the mayor of Beijing, Peng Zhen, and
was particularly vehement between 1954 and 1956. Liang Sicheng was forced to
write self-criticisms, both at the time and later during the Cultural Revolution. As
he himself recognized, the controversy over dawuding was “just the beginning of a
fierce class struggle taking place within China’s architectural community” ( p. 228).
It is merely the first of several instances in which the history of architecture and
urban planning becomes bound up with that of class and elite politics in the
Maoist era. Another example concerns Chen Zhanxiang and Hua Lanhong, who
both criticized the Tentative Master Plan of Beijing’s Urban Construction drawn up
by the Beijing Capital City Planning Commission in 1957. Wang Jun describes how,
in the autumn of that year, both men, who actually disagreed with each other
about many aspects of architecture, were portrayed in the press as working against
the party ( pp. 300–306). Wang Jun does not neglect the impact of these attacks on
the lives of his protagonists. On more than one occasion, he refers to the health of
Liang Sicheng and his wife, and while such passages may seem slightly sentimental
to some readers, they are short and remind us of the personal sufferings that many
underwent in China.
As important as the personal stories of Liang Sicheng and others are to the
planning history of Beijing, the changing city is also central to Wang Jun’s narrative. Nowhere is the destruction wrought on the urban fabric better illustrated
138 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
than during the periods of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution,
when many of the city walls were destroyed. Although initially Liang Sicheng had
some support in his advocacy for their preservation, Mao’s wishes prevailed, and
much of the outer wall fell during the Great Leap Forward ( pp. 336–352). Demolition continued. Over several pages, Wang lists numerous structures in the center
of the city that were torn down, some in the mid-1960s to make way for the Beijing
subway, and others in later years to provide material for air raid shelters, hastily
constructed in an atmosphere of exaggerated military threat. He cites a middle
school student who relates how this frenzy affected Beijing residents. “ ‘Dig tunnel
deep’ was a supreme instruction that could not be disobeyed. The city wall became
a target to be trampled down upon. The people of Beijing seemed to have gone
mad. . . . They had never thought that what they were digging was the flesh and
bone of Beijing and the soul of the nation” ( p. 425). The author’s detailed description of how such demolition was the result of political decisions made concerning
the city’s development, as well as successive campaigns, is an important point and
deserves to be looked at more closely in other cities across the country.
There is much to recommend this book, and Wang Jun is to be commended
for the impressive way in which he combines biography, urban planning, politics,
and the history of the PRC. However, at times the narrative is convoluted, sometimes returning to the 1930s and 1940s to retrieve historical context that is perhaps
unnecessary. Similarly, Liang’s sufferings during the Cultural Revolution are
mentioned more than once. Beyond this, at times the author adds detail that
seems superfluous to the argument. This practice is illustrated in the discussion of
­People’s communes at the end of chapter 8, about which Liang Sicheng had only a
brief word. While communes certainly had a huge impact on the form of cities
across China, in the context of this chapter, which focuses on the destruction of
the city walls, their discussion is unnecessary.
Perhaps some of these issues are motivated by the author’s wish to bring the
destruction of Beijing to the attention of a wider public. This is certainly laudable
and indeed necessary, but at times it leads Wang Jun into generalization. For
example, he notes that in 2002 China listed only 101 famous cultural and historical
sites, compared with over 900 in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR), and asserts that this was not because of wartime destruction, but rather
recent construction ( p. 434). There can be no doubt that urban development in
China since 1949 has paid little heed to preservation, but as Wang Jun himself
makes clear throughout Beijing Record, the interplay of politics, urban planning,
and wider historical forces is complicated and at times highly localized. Moreover, given the author’s stance on cultural preservation and the way in which he
begins the book, it is slightly disappointing to find his final chapter ending with
the legacies of Liang Sicheng, Chen Zhanxiang, and others. More recent plans
for urban development in Beijing are mentioned in passing, but a little more
detail would have been welcome. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism. At nearly
Reviews 139
five hundred pages, the book is already long, and a follow-up to Beijing Record
deals with many of these issues.2
I shall reserve my final comments for the translator and the publisher. As any
scholar who deals in foreign languages knows, there is always a tension between
remaining true to the original style and producing well-written English, and if
Beijing Record at times reads a little awkwardly, this is a reflection of this problem.
For those who approach this book for its scholarly value, somewhat less forgivable
is the publisher’s choice to omit pinyin in the footnotes. While Chinese characters
are provided in the index, tracking down the sources used has been made more
difficult, and some may wish to purchase the book in its Chinese original. These
are but minor quibbles, and the fact that Beijing Record is available in English at all
is to be commended, for it opens up the city to a new readership and will greatly
aid in comparative urban studies. Wang Jun has given us a history of the urban
landscape and the architects and planners who fought for the preservation of its
history, and in doing so, played a major part in the construction of its modern
form. All this is narrated against the political and international context in which its
development occurred. Beijing is without a doubt one of the world’s great historical urban centers, and as our gaze shifts eastward, it has again become an important city on the world stage. Understanding how its modern form was shaped in
the early years of the PRC helps us to appreciate contemporary developments and
solve problems not just within the city itself, but across China’s new urban
landscape.
Toby Lincoln
Toby Lincoln is a lecturer in modern Chinese urban history at the University of
Leicester. Previously, he received his doctor of philosophy from Oxford in 2009 and
spent a year as a postdoctoral associate in the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale
University.
Notes
1. Thomas Hahn, foreword to Beijing Record: A Physical and Political History of Planning
Modern Beijing, by Wang Jun (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2011), pp. xi–xv.
2. Wang Jun, Caifang benshang de chengshi (Cities as recorded by a journalist) (Beijing:
Sanlian shudian, 2008).
140 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
John Whalley, editor. China’s Integration into the World Economy.
Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2011. xv, 391 pp. Hardcover $88.00,
isbn 978-981-4304-78-8.
Zheng Yongnian and Sarah Y. Tong, editors. China and the Global
Economic Crisis. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2011. xiii, 294 pp.
Hardcover $96.00, isbn 978-981-4287-70-8.
The questions raised by China’s past performance and future aspirations are many
and not easy to answer. Even the past remains controversial and subject to various
interpretations. The record of impressive growth notwithstanding, controversies
range from the growth’s exact nature to its distributional and ecological aspects.
Equally unsettling are the questions regarding the future of the Chinese economy
and implications for the global economy of China’s integration into it.
Both of the volumes reviewed here contain a wide range of essays and models
and are, therefore, most timely and welcome. Both contain wide-ranging contri­
butions from a number of authors, many of whom are Chinese, and a wealth of
observations and analyses that are useful for posing and answering some of the
relevant questions alluded to in the previous paragraph. There is one methodological difference that stands out. The Whalley volume is mainly composed of modeling and simulation exercises, while the Zheng and Tong volume relies on a more
diverse set of historical, social, political, and economic analyses. Thus, each volume makes both methodological and substantive contributions in its own way.
The volume edited by Whalley contains twelve papers that he has authored or
coauthored over the last few years. These all explore aspects of China’s integration
into the world economy. As Whalley points out:
This integration has been one of the most dramatic economic events since the
period of the Second World War. Since the mid-1970s, China has increased its real
income per capita by approximately eight times. China has grown from having
trade substantially smaller than that of Hong Kong back in the 1970s to a position
today where China is the second largest trading country among all global traders.
China accounts for nearly 50% of all inward foreign investment coming from the
OECD. China has made tremendous progress in terms of poverty alleviation, with
sharp reductions in the numbers of individuals and households below the poverty
line, although this has been accompanied by a sharp increase in relative inequality
particularly between urban and rural areas. (Whalley, p. vii)
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
Nonetheless, there are many unanswered questions. Whalley and his coauthors
recognize many of the controversies. As Whalley mentions at the beginning:
How all this has been accomplished is still a subject of substantial debate and
difference of position in literature. There are those, such as Paul Krugman, who
characterize Chinese growth as a triumph of perspiration over inspiration,
emphasizing the role that physical capital accumulation has played in this process.
Reviews 141
However, more recent policy announcements in China attach great significance to
the educational process in China, where there has been an enormous four-fold
increase in the number of graduate and undergraduate students since the late
1990s and the generation of ideas, and the sharp growth which has taken place in
China’s trade in information technology products. These products now account
for nearly 40% of China’s exports, whereas back in the mid-1990s, they were
perhaps no more than 2%, with textiles and apparel being a much more prominent and important component of China’s exports.
These controversies are central to this integration process. Insofar as the
widely held belief in China has been that the major driver of China’s growth has
been its integration into the global economy, which accelerated greatly after 1992
with changes in policy structure and large inflows of foreign direct investment.
Following this there was significant growth of exports, then with further elevation
following China’s successful accession to the WTO in 2001. In recent years,
China’s export growth had been running at nearly 30% per year, pre-financial
crisis, but in the crisis fell sharply. There is also a belief in Chinese policy circles
that accumulation of human capital and infrastructure development in China
(roads, ports, telecomm, airports, etc.) have been as instrumental in the growth
process as physical capital accumulation. As noted above, the contrast in view is
notable with Western literature, which tends to emphasize physical capital
accumulation. (Whalley, pp. vii–viii)
This book has five parts. Each deals with a cluster of issues. They range from
foreign direct investment (FDI) and technology to trade policies, tax systems, and
international relations. In addition to a careful attention to key modeling issues,
the treatment of emerging issues, such as China’s technological upgrading and
economic activities in Africa, add value to the book.
The first paper, coauthored with Xian Xin, analyzes FDI inflows to China.
Analytically, it decomposes the Chinese economy into the FDI and non-FDI
sectors. Thus, it proceeds to assess the salience of FDI flows to the sustainability of
future Chinese growth. The authors use an extension of conventional single-sector
growth accounting, taking a two-sector approach. The data are broken down on a
FDI, non-FDI sectoral basis. Not surprisingly, they find that much of China’s
growth from the early 1990s on can be accounted for by FDI. Again, not surprisingly, they also find that a significant portion of China’s technical progress is
concentrated in the FDI portion of the economy. This suggests that Chinese
growth and innovation are vulnerable to a decline in FDI. This accords with a
number of analyses of Chinese growth. It would seem that the Chinese authorities
also realize their vulnerability. The story that is missing in this book is about
challenges to building a self-sustaining innovation system in China. Gabriele and
Khan (2010) analyze the complexities of the Chinese situation with respect to
economic and political economic dimensions. Even from the modeling perspective, certain nonlinearities and resulting multiple equilibriums make predictions
difficult. Thus upgrading may be a viable strategy, while jumping to frontier
technologies is fraught with difficulties.
142 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
The second paper in this volume addresses technology upgrading as part of
China’s projected growth strategy to 2020. Like Gabriele and Khan (2010), the
second paper in this volume
evaluates the eleventh 5-year plan, published in 2005 in China which emphasizes
the need for China to move from export growth based on lower quality products
such as textiles and apparel and into higher quality items such as electronics,
machine tools, autos and engineering products. This 5 year plan sets out the
whole strategy as to how this is to be accomplished: major increases in educational spending, R&D tax credits, geographical zones which will promote these
policies, large spending on mega-projects, and intellectual property arrangements
which are designed both to protect new innovations that the Chinese produce,
but also reduce dependency on expensive foreign intellectual property. (Whalley,
pp. viii–ix)
So far the plan seems to have been modestly successful, but the medium-term
impacts are still not clear.
There are no surprises in the trade and taxation chapters. However, the
­regressive aspects of value added taxes (VATs) are not discussed much. More
attention on the distributional aspects of VAT could add value. This could
have been a useful complement to the discussion of distribution in part 5 of the
book.
There is definitely something new in the fourth part of this volume. Of late,
Chinese activity in Africa has received much attention. China’s increasingly
­prominent presence in Africa has become a subject of substantial controversy.
FDI, trade, and financial flows, including aid primarily to sub-Saharan Africa,
are growing. China will soon overtake combined financial flows from multi­
lateral agencies (e.g., the World Bank and the IMF) and private inflows from
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
Although the chapter observes that the Chinese are heavily involved in Africa in
resources, textiles and apparel, construction, finance, and many other fields, the
author of this chapter does not go very far. Perhaps the rapidly changing face of
global economic involvement in Africa is one reason for this lack of adequate
coverage.
The chapter on the post–Multi-Fiber Agreement (MFA) situation is also a bit
disappointing. It does not go beyond a discussion of the size, dimensions, and
geographical composition of the Chinese export surge and the policy response
outside of China in terms of containment from the European Union, the United
States, and developing countries.
The final chapter addresses the substantial growth of inequality within a
globally integrating China. Undoubtedly, China has a record of success in reducing
absolute poverty. At the same time, relative inequality has increased dangerously.
This chapter points out that an important factor has been the hukou system of
labor mobility restrictions between urban and rural areas. This is clearly related to
Reviews 143
the issue of temporary migrant workers. Again the chapter models this successfully. However, broader issues related to structural and policy changes are not
addressed. In particular, the dismantling of the safety nets in rural areas earlier and
a shift in the power structure and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) away from the countryside are factors that need deeper analysis.
In the areas of broader social and political economy analysis, the book edited
by Zheng Yongnian and Sarah Y. Tong is of considerable interest. The immediate
context for the essays is the global economic and financial crisis. But the issues
discussed go well beyond this immediate situation. Toward the end of this essay, I
will return to some of these strategic issues.
Indeed, the V-shaped recovery of the Chinese economy has been most
impressive. Initially, the Chinese evaluation of the situation was ambiguous
because the evidence of a serious economic downturn was not clear to the policy
makers. Indeed, the Chinese government was caught by its own measures implemented to rein in an overheating economy. By the fourth quarter of 2008, when it
became evident that the Chinese economy had suffered a sharp decline as a result
of the sudden disappearance of export demand from the United States and the
European Union, sharp and determined measures to stimulate the Chinese economy were undertaken. Although the recovery has been remarkable, many questions remain.
The editors present thirteen chapters that examine various aspects of the
impact of the global economic crisis on China and some of its neighbors. The
volume begins with three chapters that explore broadly China’s economic conditions since 2008 along with the Chinese government’s policy responses. Some, like
John Wong’s opening chapter focused on China’s economic outlook for 2009, are
already dated. But he judges the Chinese economy to be resilient — a claim that
needs to be examined by keeping both the short and medium runs in mind.
In chapter 2, Yang Mu and Lim Tin Seng argue that domestic demand remains
the main source of China’s growth. Their argument for recovery on this basis
makes sense because China’s strong fiscal position and its accommodative mone­
tary policy did ensure recovery and growth in 2009 and beyond. As I will argue
later, a cautious attitude is called for with respect to the prognosis for the medium
and long run. Sarah Y. Tong’s chapter is a fairly comprehensive discussion of the
Chinese government’s policy responses to the crisis. One strength of this chapter
is that it addresses policy measures undertaken at not only the central level but
also the various provincial and local levels. While the policy initiatives cover a
broad range of areas, including spending on investment, stimulating domestic
consumption, accelerating the development of the social safety net, and revitalizing industries, the paramount emphasis still remains on investment. These are
arguably pragmatic in the short term. In my view, Tong takes a wise stance when
she warns that these same policies, if pursued without regard for longer-term need
144 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
for sustainable and balanced growth, may retard a harmonious long-run
development.
Another salient feature of this book is the regional aspects covered. Chapters
4 and 5 take just such a regional approach. They both investigate the impact and
implications of the economic crisis at different regional levels. Chapter 4, by
Huang Yanjie and Chen Shaofeng, covers the Pearl River Delta region in southern China. This region has been at the forefront of China’s economic reform
over the past three decades and is China’s most export-oriented region. Clearly,
the region was most adversely affected by the sudden drop in export demand.
This led to massive plant closures and layoffs of migrant workers. Here the
role of local leadership during a crisis came to the forefront. Showing much
­initiative, the leaders in this region vigorously pursued various policy measures to maintain aggregate demand and also to accelerate industrial
upgrading.
Likewise, chapter 5, by Yu Hong, is also focussed regionally and compares the
Yangtze River Delta region with the Pearl River Delta region. Yu examines the
differences and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two regions. The next
three chapters (chapters 6, 7, and 8) go out of the mainland and look at the three
connected economies of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. Here, too, both shortterm stimulation and longer-term restructuring and strategic issues are highlighted. Much specific material on and prospective analysis of these three
neighboring Asian economies are presented here for the interested reader.
The two chapters that follow (chapters 9 and 10) focus on China’s trade relations in the region. The slowdown in China’s trade expansion from the perspective
of regional economic growth has affected its Asian trade partners. Here trade
relations with Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and with South
Korea are examined. The authors are able to explain why a sharp slowdown in
China’s trade expansion resulted in an even greater decline in its trade with many
of its neighbors, including ASEAN.
Clearly by now, an interdependent regional production network has developed. Regional economic integration with shock-absorbing institutional capacity
and the development of a regional consumer market will be necessary to ensure
long-term growth and prosperity. The authors are unfortunately in the grips of an
implicit neoclassical trade theory framework and neglect the deep institutionbuilding issues for the region. More institutional and political economy analysis is
necessary to address the crucial needs they identify correctly.
The book concludes with three remaining chapters. These chapters examine
the ideological, social, and international relational aspects emerging from the
crisis. Most interesting, in chapter 11, Bo Zhiyue and Chen Gang helpfully examine
the significant debate on political and social economic strategies for China.
Although the debate predates the crisis, it has received new impetus leading to a
limited ascendance of China’s so-called new left. The new left is critical of Anglo-
Reviews 145
Saxon neoliberalism. It is also critical of the adverse distributional and welfare
effects of the policies pursued in the 1990s. Using increased state capacity, the
new left wants to redress these adverse developments. It is, indeed, an ambitious
advocacy for using state power to overcome the problems of injustice, inequality,
adverse ecological impact, and other negative effects of neoliberal policies. Bo
and Chen seem to argue optimistically that the new left may already have had a
positive impact.
Finally, chapters 12 and 13 discuss social stability issues and China’s response
to the international actors in the global economic crisis, respectively. In particular,
Zhao and Huang in chapter 12 examine two groups of people — retrenched migrant
workers and newly graduated college students — who are having difficulties in
finding desirable jobs. Although these authors believe they will not pose serious
challenges to social stability, this cannot be taken at face value. They admit that the
number of retrenched migrant workers is very large. However, they also point out
that the retrenched workers are too disorganized and segregated. One has to keep
in mind, however, that social movements can emerge in unexpected ways. The
combination of unemployed educated citizens, rural peasantry with grievances,
and an urban proletariat can be explosive. The Arab Spring showed that the rulers
cannot take the obedience of a ruled population for granted. Hence, the conditions
for collective action from below in the Chinese context require further close
analysis.
Chapter 13, by Zheng Yongnian and Lye Liang Fook, examines China’s external response, which, as the authors point out, has been cautious and calibrated.
They also correctly point out that the priority for the Chinese government has
been to address internal issues. However, there are signs that China may play a
responsible and constructive role, particularly in reforms of international financial
architecture (Khan 2011).
As the critical summary above indicates, both books have a lot to offer but do
not go far enough in addressing medium- to long-term strategic issues. Two
aspects need to be explored further in both the domestic and international context. The first is the sustainability of the current strategy, which is highly export
dependent and geared toward a traditional industrialization mode. Given the
ecological damages, fossil fuel energy dependence, and domestic distributional
issues, I have argued elsewhere (Khan 2010, 2012) that such a strategy may well
become unsustainable within a decade. There are also important issues related
to what may be called an ecologically unequal exchange in terms of the environmental load displacement between urban and rural China as well as between
China as a nation-state and the rest of the world system, especially Africa. There
are alternatives to the present Chinese strategy, some of which have been discussed
both by domestic critics and outside scholars. Time, however, is running out.
Related to this is the second major area of analysis that needs emphasis. This is the
logic and conditions of collective action from below for social and political change
146 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
toward a more egalitarian and sustainable society. Much specific work needs to be
done here.
Finally, the global dimensions of the need for emphasizing these aspects need
to be mentioned. As both volumes alert us, China’s integration has significant
global implications. Indeed, an ecologically sustainable and egalitarian future for
China will improve the future prospects for others in the world — both in the
global north and south. The two books reviewed are important markers on the
road to be traveled.
Haider A. Khan
Haider A. Khan is currently a distinguished professor of economics at the Joseph
Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and has also been a
visiting professor at Tokyo University and a visiting scholar at Hitotsubashi
University, Tilburg University, People’s University in Beijing, and UNU-WIDER. His
major areas of expertise are globalization, economic and econometric modeling,
economic theory, international and development economics, and political economy.
He has published twelve books and more than one hundred articles in professional
journals.
References
Gabriele, A., and H. Khan. 2010. China’s National Innovation System at the Crossroads. Berlin:
Lambert Academic Publishing.
Khan, H. 2010. “China’s Development Strategy and Energy Security.” In The Rise of China and
India: Development Strategies and Lessons, eds. Amelia Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan.
Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
—
——. 2011. “Analyzing the Implications of International Financial Reform for Developing
Economies.” Paper prepared for UNDP.
—
——. 2012. “Enhancing Economic Integration in the Asia-Pacific through the Strengthening of
National Innovation Systems-Challenges and Strategies.” Asia-Pacific Technology Monitor
(March–April).
Brantly Womack. China Among Unequals: Asymmetric Foreign Relations
in Asia. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2010. 552 pp. Hardcover
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
$130.00, isbn 978-981-4295-27-7.
Conventional wisdom in international relations suggests that a rising power is an
inherent threat, which is bound to expand its national interests and augment its
foreign influence. China has been on the rise during the last three decades. How-
Reviews 147
ever, China has hardly pursued a revisionist approach in the course of its current
rise as the most powerful state in East Asia. Such a judgment on China’s foreign
policy is supported by many well-researched studies. Even using more rigorous
criteria for determining whether a state’s foreign policy is status quo or revisionist
oriented, it is hard to conclude that China is a clearly revisionist state (Johnston
2003). In some cases, China’s efforts to improve its ties with the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are fundamental compromises that China has
chosen to make in limiting its own sovereign interests for the sake of engagement
in multilateral frameworks and pursuit of greater regional interdependence
(Shambaugh 2004/2005). In general, states will respond to a rising power in two
ways. The theory of bandwagon politics suggests that actors seek to share in the
spoils of imminent victory by jumping on the bandwagon of the apparent winner.
The balance-of-power theory suggests that a state can build up its own capabilities
or form an alliance against a rising power in order to block the dominance of
emerging hegemons in the region. However, the developments of international
relations in East Asia during the last three decades do not uphold such conventional wisdom. The great powers and most Asian states neither have strived to
build a regional coalition to counterbalance China’s rise, nor have they tended to
jump on the bandwagon of a rising China. So far, forecasts of an unavoidable
United States–China clash have not come true. China’s emergence as the most
powerful state in East Asia has been accompanied with more stability than pessimists had believed (Kang 2005). Conventional wisdom in international relations
finds its limits in explaining the relationships between the rising China and the
other Asian states and global powers.
On the one hand, China has continued to possess more resources that can be
mobilized to pursue the state’s national interests beyond its borders. On the other
hand, the rise of China has not caused widespread suspicion, jealousy, fear, and
even hostility in East Asia that would give birth to a counterbalance coalition in
the area. It has become obvious that we need other theoretic approaches to understand the puzzle behind China’s rise. Brantly Womack’s book China among
Unequals has made important contribution to theories of international relations
and the study of international relations in Asia. Based upon his insightful observations on China’s relationships with its Asian neighbors and the United States,
Womack tries to provide a new theoretical paradigm — asymmetry theory — to
analyze the international relations in East Asia. According to Womack, this new
theoretical paradigm not only has been tested by China’s rich history of successfully managing asymmetric relationships in the premodern era, but also is fully
applicable to the contemporary international relations in Asia. Therefore, the
utility of asymmetry theory lies in the fact that asymmetry theory can accurately
explain Asian international relations, which have been structured with asymmetric
relationships both traditionally and currently.
148 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
The first section of Womack’s book provides a theoretical framework on
asymmetric foreign relationships by discussing the four important issues that
are often related to the asymmetric structure of international relations: human
rights and moral autonomy, soft power wielding, the strategic dilemma of
regional powers in dealing with global powers, and the asymmetric wars between
democratic states and small states. Although the book is mainly a collection of
research essays that have been published by the author during his decades of
research on asymmetric theory in international relations, it is the most comprehensive and original study on this subject. To his credit, the author’s theoretical
discussions in this section do provide a comprehensive picture of this important
theory in the discipline of international relations. However, readers may want to
see that the author also could make some more persuasive arguments about the
importance of asymmetry theory in the discipline of international relations or
employ a critical-normative perspective to explain why asymmetry theory is better
than mainstream theories in interpreting the international relations in East Asia.
The second section examines the important thoughts, strategies, and concepts of
China’s foreign policy in the author’s theoretical framework. In this section, the
author’s discussions focus on China’s various roles in international relations,
China’s contributions to the globalization of international relations, China as a
normative power, and Chinese views on multipolarity. The author’s incisive discussion on these topics shows his superior knowledge and insightful views on China’s
foreign policy.
The third section explores asymmetry theory by focusing on some empirical
studies on the United States, China, and China-U.S. relations. Some of the author’s
comparisons are very interesting. For example, the author contrasts China’s situation in Asia with the global situation of the United States. Also he challenges the
concept of parity in traditional comparative study of the United States and China
by pointing out the gigantic difference between the two states. However, the
author could do a better job by meshing those four chapters or adding one or two
new essays on a case study of U.S.-China relations. The fourth section presents
comprehensive discussions on China’s asymmetric foreign relationships with its
Asian neighbors. In the six chapters of this section, the author tries to apply
asymmetry theory to examine the following cases: (1) the triangular relationship
of America, China, and Taiwan; (2) the impact of Sino-Vietnamese relations on
America’s Asian policy in the Vietnam War; (3) the triangular relationship of
China, Vietnam, and Cambodia in the 1970s; (4) the application of asymmetry
theory in China’s foreign relations with Southeast Asia; (5) the asymmetric
­relationship between China and Vietnam; and (6) a comparison between the
China-Vietnam asymmetric relationship and the China-Korea asymmetric relationship. These six chapters enhance the book’s thesis and provide the readers with
various perspectives in understanding the complex face of asymmetric foreign
relations.
Reviews 149
Overall, Brantly Womack’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of the international relations in Asia and key developments of U.S.-China
relations in the age of China’s rise. The book can be both a helpful reference for
China scholars and researchers and a useful textbook for students.
Sheng Ding
Sheng Ding is an associate professor of political science at Bloomsburg University of
Pennsylvania, specializing in the studies of Asian international relations.
References
Johnston, Alastair Iain. 2003. “Is China a Status Quo Power?” International Security 27, no. 4:
5–56.
Kang, David C. 2005. “Why China’s Rise Will Be Peaceful: Hierarchy and Stability in the East
Asia Region.” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 3: 548–551.
Shambaugh, David L. 2004/2005. “China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order.” International Security 29, no. 3: 64–99.
Zaijun Yuan. The Failure of China’s “Democratic” Reforms. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2011. xv, 175 pp. Hardcover $60.00,
isbn 978-0-7391-6694-9.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
If, as the author himself states in his conclusion, the “principal question of the
book” were “is liberal democracy compatible with the single-party authoritarian
political system?” ( p. 145), this endeavor would be pointless. As Yuan Zaijun points
out himself, “the answer is obviously negative” ( p. 145). Hopefully, this obvious
conclusion is not what makes this book worth reading. In what is a well-rewritten
PhD dissertation, the author analyzes exhaustively five pretended attempts at
democratization of Party rule. His demonstration is grounded in a comprehensive
study of official sources on the subject, supplemented by fieldwork and complementary readings of articles written overseas or on the Internet.
Unlike many of the authors he quotes, Yuan Zaijun is not a prisoner of his
subject: he does not feel that it is necessary to see only the positive aspects of the
reforms he analyzes. He always keeps a critical state of mind, which allows him to
present a very complete analysis of the attempts. The book is divided into seven
chapters, the first of which is an introduction that presents the literature on the
subject, while the following five are presentations of five types of reform. In the last
chapter, Yuan presents his conclusions, which are summarized in the form of two
very well-presented charts.
150 China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012
The first two attempts at building “inner-Party democracy” ( p. 30), a concept
that was hailed by numerous observers when Hu Jintao proposed it in his speech
at the closure of the 17th Party Congress, are well analyzed, and the author does
not stop at the surface of the policies. He explains that the reason the Party broadcasts much propaganda on this subject is that “the reform is safe and controllable”
( p. 34) and that these measures “will only slightly liberalise the policy-making
procedure and the mechanism of selecting and of evaluating cadres at the primary
levels. The reform will not change the Party’s centralised organisation system”
( p. 34). The author then proceeds with a detailed description of the reform
through eleven case studies. At the nomination step, there is the possibility of “selfnomination” ( p. 36) and a “qualification-check” ( p. 42). Yuan notes that the “criteria
enabled the organisers to exclude those they disliked from entering the elections”
( p. 40). Criteria usually concern age, education, work experience, and official rank.
The final candidates are elected from those who nominated themselves, but in the
majority of cases, it is the higher-level Party committee that makes the decision.
Candidates are often required to take written and oral tests, but the examiners all
belong to the higher-echelon Party committee. Then there is a public poll, and
only candidates who have obtained 60 percent of all votes can proceed to the
election ( p. 43). Finally, the higher-echelon Party members vote in the election. In
this reform, the whole process is controlled by the Party committee ( p. 47).
The other instance of “inner Party democracy” concerns the Party congress:
one way to improve it would be to hold an annual plenary meeting of the congress
( p. 65). Other cases analyzed in the book concern the elections of congress members. Self-nominations can happen only at the grassroots level, and as the government leaders must be members of the congress, their seats are guaranteed. The
number of candidates is superior to the number of candidates only at the grassroot
level, where there is a small measure of competition. In any case, “the grassroots
Party members accounted for only 3.5 [percent] of all Party congress members”
( p. 65). So the reformed Party congress still cannot genuinely elect local Party
leaders, and the role of the organization department remains very important
( p. 67). The author also analyzes the cases of what he terms “the second most
liberal” ( p. 147) reform, the direct election of township cadres, which were first
held in Buyun (Sichuan) in 1998. He analyzes six cases of direct elections, but also
underlines that they were prohibited by the Center after they were held. In these
cases, elections were more open as voters could “vote on the candidates in a public
opinion poll and the result might decide if the candidates could enter the next
round” ( p. 17). However, the author notes that in “every experiment, there was at
least one stage where the power holders played a dominant role and the grassroots
voters were excluded” ( p. 17). He also notes that these experimentations were
possible only when a county Party secretary decided to conduct them. This is also
the case in the instances of “deliberative democracy” ( p. 73), which he presents in
another chapter. This chapter is quite enlightening as many Western political
Reviews 151
scientists have been involved in some of these experiments, especially the case of
Zeguo. Yuan shows that despite the fact that these attempts allow more participation by grassroots citizens (although it does not involve selection of leaders as
there are no elections), it does not put any limitations on Party power.
The only type of democratic reform that attempts to curb the power of the
Communist Party is the presentation of independent candidates, especially
because they are the result of initiatives of individuals who challenge the Party
monopoly on elections. In the last chapter of the book, Yuan analyzes most of the
cases that took place before 2012. He presents in detail the itineraries of the various
independent candidates who dared challenge the monopoly of the Party. He also
describes the interventions by Party cadres who, through manipulation, repression, threats, propaganda, and other coercive means, have created all possible
obstacles to prevent them from being elected. Yuan has used a remarkable quantity
of sources, some official, but mostly unofficial, including Internet postings, electoral propaganda material, overseas journals, and very extensive fieldwork. This
chapter is really fascinating as it gives a glimpse of the difficulties encountered by
the citizens who try to escape Party control and participate directly in political life.
However, Yuan’s conclusion is quite pessimistic: “The Party is unwilling to accept
and it represses anything truly democratic in China even if it happens at the local
level” ( pp. 145–147). Yuan was proved right by the 2012 elections of the People’s
Congress, when most independent candidates were unable to get elected. The
author shows that a political reform tending toward real democracy seems to be
still a long way off. Nonetheless, this book is very enlightening on the issue of
democratic reforms and is a must for anyone interested in the reform of the
­Chinese political system.
Jean-Philippe Béja
Jean-Philippe Béja is a senior researcher at CNRS, CEFC (French Centre for research
on Contemporary China), Hong Kong. He specializes in the study of state-society
relations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and in Hong Kong politics. He has
written extensively on dissent in the PRC as well as translated Liu Xiaobo’s works.
Recently he has edited The Impact of China’s Tiananmen Massacre (London:
Routledge, 2011), and coedited Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08 and the Challenges of
Political Reform in China, to be published in 2012 by Hong Kong University Press.
Works
Received
Tamara Heimarck Bentley. The
Figurative Works of Chen Hongshu
(1599–1652): Authentic Voices/
Expanding Markets. Ashgate
Publishing Company, 2012.
Julia Boyd. A Dance with the Dragon:
The Vanished World of Peking’s Foreign
Colony. I. B. Tauris, 2012.
Xiaojiong Ding. Policy Metamorphosis
in China: A Case Study of Minban
Education in Shanghai. Rowman and
Littlefield, 2012.
Mark Gamsa. The Reading of Russian
Literature in China: A Moral Example
and Manual of Practice. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Cho-yun Hsu. China: A New Cultural
History. Columbia University Press,
2006.
Lorraine Justice, foreword by Xin
Xiangyang. China’s Design Revolution.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Press, 2012.
Zhihua Shen, translated by Neil Silver.
Mao, Stalin and the Korean War:
Trilateral Communist Relations in the
1950s. Routledge, 2012.
Henry Kissinger. On China. Penguin
Press, 2011.
Spring Su. Property Ownership and
Private Higher Education in China: On
What Grounds? Rowman and
Littlefield, 2011.
Zhenyun Liu, translated by Howard
Goldblatt. Cellphone. MerwinAsia, 2011.
Chun Mei. The Novel and Theatrical
Imagination in Early Modern China.
Brill Academic Publishers, 2011.
Michael Radich. How Ajatasatru Was
Reformed: The Domestication of “Ajase”
and Stories in Buddhist History. The
International Institute for Buddhist
Studies, 2011.
Christian Schwermann. “Dummheit”
in altchinesischen Texten Eine
Begriffsgeschichte. Harrassowitz
Publishing House, 2011.
Aad van Amstel. Barbaren, Rebellen en
Mandarijnen, de VOC in de slage in
China in de Gouden Eeuw. Uitgeverij
Thoeris, 2011.
Xun Xhou. The Great Famine in China,
1958–1962: A Documentary History.
Yale University Press, 2012.
Joy Yueyue Zhang. The
Cosmopolitanization of Science: Stem
Cell Governance in China. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
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TRANSPACIFIC
ARTICULATIONS
Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America
CHIH-MING WANG
In 1854 Yung Wing, who graduated with
a bachelor’s degree from Yale University,
returned to a poverty-stricken China,
where domestic revolt and foreign invasion were shaking the Chinese empire.
Inspired by the U.S. and its liberal education, Yung believed that having more Chinese students educated there was the only
way to bring reform to China. Since then,
generations of students from China—and
other Asian countries—have embarked
on this transpacific voyage in search of
modernity.
Beginning with the story of Yung Wing, the book is organized chronologically to show the transpacific character of Asian student migration.
The author examines Chinese students’ writings in English and Chinese,
maintaining that so-called “overseas student literature” represents both
an imaginary passage to modernity and a transnational culture where
meanings of Asian America are rearticulated through Chinese. He also
demonstrates that Chinese student political activities in the U.S. in the
late 1960s and 1970s have important but less examined intersections
with Asian America. In addition, the work offers a reflection on the
development of Asian American studies in Asia to suggest the continuing significance of knowledge and movement in the formation of Asian
America.
July 2013 | 224 pages | 3 maps
ISBN 978-0-8248-3642-9 | Cloth $46.00
UNIVERSITY off HAWAI‘I PRESS
www.uhpress.hawaii.edu
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China Review International publishes reviews of recent scholarly literature and
“state-of-the-art” articles in Chinese studies across the disciplines and languages.
Reviews are generally by invitation only; however, unsolicited reviews will be
considered for publication based on merit.
Reviews are published in English. If a contribution is written in another language,
the original and an English translation are requested. Manuscripts should be
submitted to the managing editor in the form of two paper copies (text doublespaced, footnotes formatted as endnotes) and one copy of the review’s computer
file via e-mail attachment. Chinese should be transliterated using pinyin. You may
include Chinese characters in the body of your text, if desired. Please list complete
publication data on the reviewed book at the head of your review, using the journal text as style sheet.
Book reviews and books for review should be sent to Managing Editor, China
Review International, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Hawai‘i, 1890
East-West Road, Moore 417, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. If you would be interested
in becoming a reviewer for CRI, please write to the managing editor, or send an
e-mail message to [email protected].
Rates for digital-only delivery (by e-mail): Institutions $50.00 a year; individuals
$30.00 a year. Rates for printed delivery (by post): $100.00 a year. Payment in U.S.
currency by check, money order, or dollar draft preferred. Claims for issues not
received will be honored for 180 days past the date of publication; thereafter, the
single copy rate will be charged. Subscriptions and address changes should be sent
directly to University of Hawai‘i Press; e-mail: [email protected].
China Review International is published quarterly by University of Hawai‘i Press,
2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA.