History

posts related to modern Chinese history

CCP or CPC

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Source: China Media Project (3/30/23)
CCP or CPC: A China Watchers’ Rorschach
The choice to use either CCP or CPC for China’s ruling Communist Party has become politically charged, but how did this distinction arise — and does it even matter?
By Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

On a cold January evening in 1931, He Yeduo (贺页朵) pledged his life to the Chinese Communist Party. The 45-year-old Jiangxi peasant was barely literate, but at the oath-swearing ceremony on a Red Army base in the Jinggang Mountains, the “cradle of the Chinese revolution,” he took out a piece of red cloth and began writing.

A quarter of the Chinese characters he wrote, professing his faith to the then-embattled and apparently doomed guerrilla forces in his native province, were misspelled. But at the top of the cloth, now regarded as a divine relic of the revolution, are three perfectly formed letters, the name of the organization he would die for: “C.C.P.”

Nine decades later, these three letters have become an unacceptable slur to many supporters of He’s beloved Chinese Communist Party. Continue reading →

Workshop Youth in Chinese History

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Call for Abstracts
Workshop Youth in Chinese History: Education and Representations of Young People in Chinese Sources between Tradition and Modernity
September 14-15, 2023
Oxford University, Centre for Chinese Studies, Lucina Ho room

Organizers
Giulia Falato (Oxford University)
Renata Vinci (University of Palermo)

Workshop topic short description

In China, childhood and education have historically been intertwined with ritual practices and social relations, with their ultimate scope being the construction of an ideal society and the formation of a virtuous elite. While canonical texts and conduct books have constantly played a crucial role in shaping children’s original character, the development of educational theories and practices throughout Chinese history has also been deeply influenced by endogenous and exogenous doctrines such as Daoism, Buddhism, Christianity and Western thought. This workshop proposes to generate discussions around the evolution of educational practices and representations of children across the centuries and literary genres, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. It seeks to highlight the diachronic correlation between family units and broader society, and how the moral and intellectual cultivation of children aimed at creating pillars upon which the ideal of stability rested. Continue reading →

On national humiliation, don’t mention the Russians

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Source: China Media Project (3/24/23)
On National Humiliation, Don’t Mention the Russians
In an era of revanchist territorial claims and chest-thumping nationalist rhetoric, one topic remains revealingly taboo: taking back what Russia took from China.
By Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

The enduring zeitgeist of Chinese “wolf warrior diplomacy” has created an atmosphere wherein nationalistic outbursts and calls for retribution are not only welcome but rewarded. But as Shanghai TV personality Zhou Libo recently discovered, not all calls to relive national glory are welcome.

On the eve of President Xi Jinping’s first state visit to Moscow since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the stand-up comedian and China’s Got Talent judge was banned from social media platforms Weibo and Toutiao for suggesting in a post that Xi’s “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” should include recovering land ceded to Russia in the 19th century. While calls to “take back” other lost Qing possessions like Taiwan are staples of Chinese nationalism, Zhou’s case shows that such revanchist rhetoric gets a frosty reception on the country’s Siberian frontier. Continue reading →

Representations of East Asian Migrants and Settlers–cfp

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Call for Papers
Representations of East Asian Migrants and Settlers in the Western United States ca. 1850-1929
Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, MT
26-28 September 2024

A conference on the theme of Representations of East Asian Migrants and Settlers in the Western United States ca. 1850-1929 has been organized by Professor Todd Larkin and Professor Hua Li at the Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, under the aegis of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Montana State University Foundation.

The event will provide scholars from universities, museums, libraries, and archives an opportunity to exchange research on the ways Asian American and Euro-American artists represented Asian migrants and settlers in art and culture in the period between the Gold Rush and the Great Depression.  Please consider submitting a proposal to present a paper to the relevant session chair by the 15 October 2023 deadline.

For more information about the initiative, sessions, and proposal deadline, please click on this link — https://art.montana.edu/conference_call_for_papers.html

Posted by: Hua Li <huali@montana.edu>

Tombstone Histories

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NEW PUBLICATION: “Tombstone Histories” by Dan Ben-Canaan
https://earnshawbooks.com/product/tombstone-histories/

Tombstone Histories: Tales of Jewish Life in Harbin is a venture into the strange past of a great Chinese city named Harbin that was for a time home to some 38 different national communities among them a glorious Jewish community before war and revolution destroyed their lives. Tombstone Histories presents the Jewish experience in the city in a personal and unforgettable way. It paints a revealing picture, never shown before, of Jewish daily life in this faraway and alien land.

History so often ends up as just a series of tombstones, but this book provides the other side to the story—the personal details of lives which allow readers to draw their own conclusions about the human experience, especially survival.

Professor Dan Ben-Canaan <canaan@inter.net.il>

Writer on death row

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Source: Taipei Times (1/15/23)
Taiwan in Time: Writer on death row
Condemned for masterminding a kidnapping, award-winning author Tang Chen-huan’s first piece — a heart-rending letter to his young son — was published on Jan. 18, 1972
By Han Cheung / Staff reporter

The cover of The Confessions of A Death Row Inmate, published in 1975. Photo courtesy of National Central Library

Titled “Confessions of a Father on Death Row,” (一個死刑犯父親的心聲), Tang Chen-huan’s (唐震寰) literary debut was one of sorrow and regret.

It ran in the literary supplement of the China Daily News (中華日報) on Jan. 18, 1972, and marked the beginning of Tang’s literary career, which included several awards and a movie adaptation. He was the nation’s first inmate to pay taxes on book royalties.

The well-liked former junior high school teacher was condemned for kidnapping the children of a businessman who had cheated him out of a large sum of money. Although he returned the kids unharmed, such crimes were punishable by death during the Martial Law era.

“I wrote for nearly 20 hours a day, because I didn’t know if I would be dragged out and executed when the morning came,” he writes in a Xiangguang Magazine (香光莊嚴) article in 1996. “As long as I could still breathe, I wanted to write down all the words I wanted to say … I hoped that those in precarious situations, or those who sought revenge, could see me as an example and refrain from doing something they would regret forever.” Continue reading →

Warning for the world (3)

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Read in ebook this memory of an old lady worried about Hong Kong’s future after having lived a longtime in People’s China, until 1971. Perry Link’s criticism against self-fiction, writing that this is more a novel than an history book, has its points: but even in fake memories you find a lot of truth. Probably she reconstructs a lot, attributing to Zhou Enlai or Zhou Yang sentences that they never pronounced, but she was a good listener, as the title mentions, and she had to destroy previous manuscripts to avoid being purged.

So what?

Silvia Calamandrei < scalamandrei51@gmail.com>

A tragedy pushed to the shadows (1)

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Very interesting book excerpt by Tani Branigan.

I think it is important to distinguish between the sent down youth, many of whom believed in Mao or tried to believe and often want credit for it, and, on the other hand, the victims persecuted, hurt and killed by Mao’s forces, including by the youth who followed Mao’s commands during the CR.

In my article on the museums and memorials created by former sent-down youth, I noted how in contrast, every attempt to create a museum for the victims has been blocked or quashed:

“Bury Me With My Comrades: Memorializing Mao’s Sent-Down Youth.” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Volume 16, Issue 14, Number 4 (July 15, 2018).

I was just in Cambodia. With the decisive break they have made with Pol Pot — in contrast to China’s holding on to Mao — they do have memorials to the victims of Pol Pot and his Mao-inspired Cambodian Communism. One can only hope that China too will be able to face its own modern history.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

A tragedy pushed to the shadows

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Source: The Guardian (1/19/23)
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution
It is impossible to understand China without understanding this decade of horror, and the ways in which it scarred the entire nation. So why do some of that era’s children still look back on it with fondness?
By

University teachers from Tsinghua and Beijing working to reinforce a dyke during the Cultural Revolution.

University teachers from Tsinghua and Beijing working to reinforce a dyke during the Cultural Revolution. Photograph: Chronicle/Alamy

From a distance, you might have mistaken them for teenagers, though they were in late middle age. It wasn’t just the miniskirts and heels on their slim frames, or the ponytails and flaming lipstick, but the girlish way the women held hands, stroked arms, massaged shoulders, smoothed sleeves and straightened bag straps, giddy with affection. Their makeup was heavy, with boldly pencilled brows, and their long hair tinted black or dyed brassy blond – recreating a youth that had never been theirs to enjoy.

Auntie Huang was wistful as we watched a couple of students stroll past in the grounds of Chongqing University, green with palms and willows and great thickets of bamboo. We had made ourselves at home in a little pavilion set upon the lake.

“Just like today’s young people, I wanted to do many things, like go to university, but I couldn’t,” she told me. “I was 18. I felt there was no hope. We had no hope at all. One person would cry and then everyone would start. It was dejection. Despair.”

In late 1968, the train and bus stations of Chinese cities filled with sobbing adolescents and frightened parents. The authorities had decreed that teenagers – deployed by Mao Zedong as the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution – were to begin new lives in the countryside. A tide of youth swept towards impoverished villages. Auntie Huang and her friends were among them. Seventeen million teenagers, enough to populate a nation of their own, were sent hundreds of miles away, to places with no electricity or running water, some unreachable by road. The party called it “going up to the mountains and down to the countryside”, indicating its lofty justification and the humble soil in which these students were to set down roots. Some were as young as 14. Many had never spent a night away from home. Continue reading →

Warning for the World (1)

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Dear MCLC:

Any book that, in the face of the CCP’s current campaign to erase memory of the horrors of late Maoism, should be championed. So good for Alexandra Stevenson in drawing attention to Yuan-tsung Chen’s new book.

But as history the book is seriously flawed.  When the publishers at Oxford wrote me many months ago for a blurb, I read the manuscript and advised that they publish it as fiction. Yuan-tsung Chen had already published good historical fiction (The Dragon’s Village), and this could be presented that way. But I could not blurb for it as history, I wrote.

I was surprised to receive the finished book and to see that an acknowledgment had been added: “Thanks also go to Andrew Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and Perry Link, Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and Chancellorial Chair Professor for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California, Riverside, for their encouragement.” Simply not true.  I had not encouraged.

In the book, Ms. Chen writes about how she met Zhou Enlai by chance, when she was just a teenager, and how that was enough for him to remember her many years later, and to have had a secret crush on her.  She writes also how Zhou Yang confided his worries about persecuting Hu Feng with her, a twenty-something-year-old outsider in Beijing, while Zhou remained reluctant to confide in others. How much more credible are these recollections, I have to wonder, than her quite false “acknowledgement” that I encouraged her? Continue reading →

Warning for the world

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Source: NYT (1/13/23)
She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World.
At 93, the memoirist Yuan-tsung Chen hopes that her recollections of China’s tumultuous past will help the country confront its historical wrongs — and avoid repeating them.
By Alexandra Stevenson

The author Yuan-tsung Chen at her home in Hong Kong in July. Her latest book is “The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao’s Court.”

The author Yuan-tsung Chen at her home in Hong Kong in July. Her latest book is “The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao’s Court.” Credit…Anthony Kwan for The New York Times

HONG KONG — Yuan-tsung Chen, an author, leaned forward in an oversize velvet chair to tell the story of the man so hungry that he ate himself.

Once, that tale had seemed unbelievable to her. “I thought that was an exaggeration,” she said. But living in a village during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s calamitous attempt to catapult China into communist plenty in the late 1950s, changed her view on what extreme hunger could drive people to actually do.

“It wasn’t anyone’s exaggeration, it was as true as real life, but nobody would say it,” Ms. Chen said, recalling the desperation and starvation caused by Mao’s experiment. Historians estimate that up to 45 million people died over the course of five years.

Now, sitting at a restaurant in one of Hong Kong’s most opulent hotels, Ms. Chen, 93, says she has a warning for the world.

Having lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in China’s recent history, Ms. Chen disputes the Communist Party’s sanitized version of its past and worries it has allowed it to continue making mistakes with global consequences. Continue reading →

Labourer’s Love centenary publication

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Journal of Chinese Film Studies is pleased to announce the publication of a special section to celebrate the centenary of Labourer’s Love (勞工之愛情, dir. Zhang Shichuan 張石川):

Guest editor’s introduction (by Xuelei Huang)

A hundred years ago, on the day of the Moon Festival, Shanghai’s foreign-run Olympic Theatre (Xialing peike yingxi yuan 夏令配克影戲院) screened two Chinese film comedies. One of them was known as Laogong zhi aiqing 勞工之愛情 (Labourer’s Love), although merely five days before it was introduced under the more classical-sounding Zhi guo yuan 擲果緣 (Romance of Fruit-throwing). This seemingly incoherent, provisional debut, however, did not diminish the favour the film was to receive from the magician of time. For reasons unknown to us, it has survived the whirlwind of twentieth-century Chinese history, standing now as the much fêted First (extant Chinese film). Being the sole “brand ambassador” of Chinese silent-era film comedy, it has been screened worldwide to a diverse mix of audience—film festival cinephiles, historians, college students, and youtube or bilibili surfers. It has been featured in a sizable scholarly literature, representing a slice of post-May-Fourth Chinese society, the Shanghai-based vernacular mass culture, a sample of Hollywood-inspired filmic language, and a remnant of the pioneering Mingxing Company and the legendary partnership of Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu, the founding fathers of Chinese film. Continue reading →

Jiang Zemin dies at 96

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Source: NYT (11/30/22)
Jiang Zemin, Leader Who Guided China Into Global Market, Dies at 96
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
Mr. Jiang, a wily and garrulous politician, presided over a decade of meteoric economic growth in the post-Tiananmen era.
By Chris Buckley and Michael Wines

Jiang Zemin in Hong Kong in 1998. As China’s leader, Mr. Jiang amassed influence that endured long past his formal retirement, giving him a major say in picking the current leader, Xi Jinping.

Jiang Zemin in Hong Kong in 1998. As China’s leader, Mr. Jiang amassed influence that endured long past his formal retirement, giving him a major say in picking the current leader, Xi Jinping. Credit…Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Jiang Zemin, the Shanghai Communist kingpin who was handpicked to lead China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and presided over a decade of meteoric economic growth, died on Wednesday in Shangau. He was 96.

A Communist Party announcement issued by Chinese state media said the cause was leukemia and multiple organ failure.

His death and the memorial ceremonies to follow come at a delicate moment in China, where the ruling party is confronting a wave of widespread protests against its pandemic controls, a nationwide surge of political opposition unseen since the Tiananmen movement of Mr. Jiang’s time.

Mr. Jiang was president of China for a decade from 1993. In the eyes of many foreign politicians, Mr. Jiang was the garrulous, disarming exception to the mold of stiff, unsmiling Chinese leaders. He was the Communist who would quote Lincoln, proclaim his love for Hollywood films and burst into songs like “Love Me Tender.”

Less enthralled Chinese called him a “flowerpot,” likening him to a frivolous ornament, and mocking his quirky vanities. In his later years young fans celebrated him, tongue-in-cheek, with the nickname “toad.” But Mr. Jiang’s unexpected rise and quirks led others to underestimate him, and over 13 years as Communist Party general secretary he matured into a wily politician who vanquished a succession of rivals. Continue reading →

Censors delete article on Hu Jintao

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Source: China Digital Times (10/25/22)
Censors Delete History Journal Article on Hu Jintao after Exit from Party Congress
By Alexander Boyd

On Saturday, October 22, Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao was unceremoniously escorted out of the closing of the 20th Party Congress in front of the domestic and international press. Hu’s highly unusual exit, a major departure from the strict political choreography characteristic of Party Congresses past, left observers across the world questioning what, exactly, had happened. In an English-language tweet, official state news agency Xinhua claimed: “When he [Hu Jintao] was not feeling well during the session, his staff, for his health, accompanied him to a room next to the meeting venue for a rest. Now, he is much better.” There was no accompanying Chinese-language report and no other Chinese outlets ran pieces on Hu’s removal. China Central Television, the state-run broadcaster, included a clip of Hu attending the Party Congress in an evening broadcast but did not mention his exit. CDT has re-published a video, in Chinese, from Singapore’s CNA (Channel NewsAsia) showing the circumstances of his exit:

Continue reading →