History

posts related to modern Chinese history

Overseas Chinese History Museum lecture

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The ‘Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative Public Talk Series’ will be hosting the next talk on Monday 18th September at 12: 00 pm to 13:30 pm (BST)

Our speaker, Mr. Ning Yi, Deputy Director of Overseas Chinese History Museum of China, will give a talk on Tracing the History of Chinese Diasporas and Narrating Stories of Cultural Exchange — Explorations and Practices at the Overseas Chinese History Museum of China. The talk will be given in Mandarin Chinese. Simultaneous translation into English is provided.

The event is jointly hosted by HOMELandS (Hub On Migration, Exile, Languages and Spaces) at University of Westminster and the Chinese Heritage Centre of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It is organised as part of the project Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative funded by AHRC.

This is a free event, held online via Zoom. Please register here – Eventbrite link – for access to the meeting on the day.

Best wishes,

Cangbai Wang c.wang6@westminster.ac.uk

Diasporic Chinese Museums talk series

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Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative Public Talk Series
全球华侨华人博物馆协作项目线上讲座系列

Talk One

Museum across borders: toward a dialogical approach to museum representations of Chinese diasporas around the world
他山之石：建构一个华侨华人博物馆研究与实践的对话空间

Date: Tue 22 August 2023
Time: 12:00 pm to 13:30 pm (BST)
Venue: Online
Zoom ID: 839 0520 6326
Password: 12345
Or click on the link here: https://ntu-sg.zoom.us/j/83905206326?pwd=bFFTQ0Rpa28yM21zL1lreEpWSFV1dz09

Chair: Associate Professor Yow Cheun Hoe, Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University
Speaker: Dr. Cangbai Wang, University of Westminster

Museum has become a vital platform of making and preserving diasporic heritage, articulating identities and negotiating the relationship between diasporas and the homeland. This talk first outlines the emerging landscape of diasporic Chinese museums around the world. Next, it introduces a dialogical approach to museums that underpins the ‘Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Initiative’ project. It argues for the value and urgency of developing a global network as a platform for open and interdisciplinary dialogue between academics and museum professionals on this important but so far under-studied topic. By initiating and facilitating dialogues across geographic and national boundaries, the project seeks to generate new insight on the research and practice of diasporic museum and heritage in the diasporic Chinese context and beyond. Continue reading →

New patriotic education law (1)

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China’s new patriotic education law will try to enforce patriotic education in institutions, schools, religious communities, businesses, and homes, and to extend patriotic education to Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, overseas Chinese, and the internet. The history of the PRC has included many ideological indoctrination campaigns. They are symptoms of the Party-State’s preoccupation with the decay of socialist and/or nationalist values. They emerge when officialist values have faded away.

This is not a new phenomenon. Chapter 18 of the DAODEJING seems to suggest that official attempts to promote official values has been a constant in Chinese political philosophy. Daoist texts often parody or satirise official Confucian texts and mores. Chapter 18 seems to say that such attempts arrive when it’s already too late, preaching moral virtues after they’ve decayed away:

大道廢，有仁義；智慧出，有大偽；六親不和，有孝慈；國家昏亂，有忠臣—道德經, 十八

When the great dao (大道 dàdào) falls out of use, humanitarianism (仁 rén) and moral obligation (義 yì) are preached. When knowledge (智慧 zhìhuì) spreads, (偽 wěi) artifice (falsity, hypocrisy) appears. When the harmony in family relationships (六親 liùqīn, the 6 relationships) falls asunder, the obligations between parents and children (孝慈 xiàocí) are preached. When the country falls into disorder (亂 luàn), ministers are told to be loyal (忠臣 zhōngchén).

—Daodejing, 18

Closing the stable after the horse has bolted?

Sean Golden

The Longest Transitional Justice

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Source: Arcade: The Humantities in the World (6/29/23)
The Longest Transitional Justice: An Immigrant Scholar Defends Affirmative Action
By Haiyan Lee

Untitled by Jack Gould depicts basketball players fighting for the ball.

Untitled by Jack Gould; Graphic by Sheena Lai

Let me begin with a bald statement: Race-conscious affirmative action is not about diversity. Rather, it is about justice. And it is about the kind of justice that the American legal system is ill-equipped to deliver: transitional justice.[1]

You might ask, who am I and what standing do I have in making such an assertation? My response is simple: I’m a naturalized citizen and the experience of writing a book on China’s political-legal culture has made me take a keen interest in the debate on affirmative action and the recent SCOTUS ruling on the unconstitutionality of race-conscious college admissions. Still, you ask, what does the rule of law or the lack thereof in China have to do with America’s fight over affirmative action? A quick answer is: a lot, in the sense that the US and China have chosen radically different paths in redressing historical wrongs. And the reflecting on the difference may help us process the adverse ruling.

When Americans think of transitional justice, they think of countries like South Africa, Cambodia, and Argentina, countries that bid painful farewell to oppressive regimes and birthed new democratic governance through a wrenching process of truth and reconciliation. Yet insofar as transitional justice is about coming to terms with historical injustices in collective, organized, and bracing fashion, it is a far more common experience than legal theorists have generally recognized. In my view, the entire post-Civil War US history can be viewed as one of the longest episodes of transitional justice in world history. Continue reading →

‘Eliminating the emperor’s cronies’

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Source: China Digital Times (6/28/23)
Weibo Users Dub Wagner Group Rebellion a “Real-life Version of ‘Eliminating the Emperor’s Cronies'”
By Cindy Carter

An antiquated Chinese political phrase enjoyed a brief revival when it was dusted off and used by some online commentators to describe the series of events known variously as the “Wagner Group Revolt/Rebellion/Insurrection/Mutiny/etc.”

The phrase “eliminating the Emperor’s cronies” (清君侧, qīng jūn cè) refers to the removal of powerful but treacherous courtiers and officials from the ambit of a reigning emperor by another group claiming fealty to the emperor. For millennia, it has been used to justify all manner of palace coups, usurpations, and uprisings, including the Rebellion of the Seven States (154 B.C.E.) against the Han Dynasty Emperor Jing; the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763 C.E) that sought to topple the Tang Dynasty; and the Jingnan Campaign (1399-1402 C.E.), a three-year civil war between supporters of two rival Ming Dynasty claimants.

The phrase began popping up on Weibo over the weekend, following reports that troops from the Wagner Group, a private Russian paramilitary organization led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, were marching toward Moscow to challenge attempts by the Russian Ministry of Defense to subsume Wagner troops into its own command structure. Aware of Prigozhin’s close ties with Putin—and of Prigozhin’s long-running rivalry with top military brass, mainly Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Armed Forces Chief Valery Gerasimov—some Chinese netizens described the incident as “a real-life version of ‘eliminating the Emperor’s cronies.’” Continue reading →

The World of Xi Jinping’s Court

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Source: China Media Project (6/15/23)
The World in Xi Jinping’s Court
The visual treatment of reports in the official media on the appointment of Chinese ambassadors, and the acceptance of foreign ones, bears an important message about the imperial ambitions of China’s top leader.
By David Bandurski

A procession of China’s Imperial Court in 1900 into the Palace in Beijing. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Throughout the first three decades of China’s reform period, the presentation of credentials by foreign ambassadors was a routine affair, hardly meriting special attention in the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily. This has changed dramatically in Xi Jinping’s New Era, as CMP noted in some detail our most recent monthly report on CCP discourse in cooperation with Sinocism.

Once consigned to the inside pages, such reports have risen to the front page, portraying Xi Jinping as a leader of imperial proportions, at the center of his diplomatic universe. Conscientiously constructed by party-state media, this image recalls the glorious dynastic past that Xi has so often invoked — when envoys, having traveled the Silk Road, would arrive in the capital to pay tribute to the emperor presiding over his court (万邦来朝). Continue reading →

How a massacre shaped China’s media

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Source: China Media Project (6/2/23)
How a Massacre Shaped China’s Media
When it comes to media and information control policies, all Chinese live today with the legacy of the Tiananmen Massacre. We look back on a brief moment before the brutal crackdown when China’s press stood with those clamoring for change.
By David Bandurski

Journalists from the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, march toward Tiananmen Square on May 17, 1989. The banner over their heads reads: “Eliminate Martial Law, Protect the Capital.”

When Xi Jinping addressed Chinese journalists on February 19, 2016, emphasizing loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party as the fundamental condition of their work, he spoke a phrase that has echoed across the now 34 years since the brutal murder of innocent students and citizens by government savagery on June 4, 1989. “Adhering to correct public opinion guidance,” said Xi, “is the heart and soul of propaganda and public opinion work.”

This concept that Xi describes as the “heart and soul” of press and information control in today’s China is about cutting out the real heart and soul of the people — ensuring not that the voices and demands of the population are heard, but that the undeviating voice of the Party dominates the life and politics of the country.

The lead editorial on the front page of the April 26, 1989, edition of the People’s Daily characterizes the peaceful protests in Beijing as destructive “riots” (动乱) that are “an attack on the Chinese Communist Party and the socialism system.”

Underpinning all work to control information and public opinion today, from the latest commentary in a state-run newspaper to every comment on the most popular social media platform, “public opinion guidance” (正确舆论导向) reaffirms and focuses the CCP’s conviction that media control is essential to regime stability.

The concept emerged in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre, as the new leadership under Jiang Zemin (江泽民) — who as Party Secretary of Shanghai had played a central role in the April shutdown of the country’s most liberal newspaper, the World Economic Herald (世界经济导报) — identified the factors leading to the unrest in Beijing and across the country. The leadership’s assessment centered on a meeting that Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳), the ousted liberal premier, had held with his top propaganda officials on May 6, 1989, ten days after the People’s Daily had published the infamous April 26 commentary (shown above) taking an attitude of zero tolerance and branding the protests as “an attack on the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system.” Continue reading →

New Tiananmen exhibit in NYC

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Source: NYT (6/2/23)
Tiananmen Exhibit Is ‘a Symbol of Defiance’
A new display on the 1989 massacre is set to open in Manhattan, two years after a Tiananmen museum closed in Hong Kong.
By Lola Fadulu and Ashley Southall

ImagePhotos of people who were killed during the Tiananmen Square protests. Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

A new exhibition is set to open in Midtown Manhattan memorializing those killed when Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters who had gathered in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The exhibit, which will open this month, comes two years after officials in Hong Kong cracked down on commemorations of the Tiananmen Square protests.

The 2,000-square-foot display includes newspaper clippings, letters written to protesters who were sent to jail, a bloodstained banner and a tent. Organizers said they also have many pictures, audio and video that have yet to be displayed.

“We’re much more than a museum, more than any museum, because this is a symbol of defiance,” said David Yu, the executive director of the group that organized the exhibition.

Many of the items in the exhibition — which were displayed in Washington, D.C., last year — are from friends of Zhou Fengsuo, an exiled former protest organizer whose name and picture are on the Chinese government’s 1989 list of the 21 most-wanted students. Since 1989 he has worked closely with political prisoners. Continue reading →

China’s Hidden Century exhibit

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China’s Hidden Century
Exhibition May 18 – October 8, 2023
The British Museum

In a global first, the resilience and innovation of 19th-century China is revealed in a major new exhibition.

Between 1796 and 1912 Qing China endured numerous civil uprisings and foreign wars, with revolution ultimately bringing an end to some 2,000 years of dynastic rule and giving way to a modern Chinese republic. This period of violence and turmoil was also one of extraordinary creativity, driven by political, cultural and technological change. In the shadow of these events lie stories of remarkable individuals – at court, in armies, in booming cosmopolitan cities and on the global stage.

The exhibition is underpinned by a four-year research project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and led by the British Museum and London University, in collaboration with over 100 scholars from 14 countries. Continue reading →

Lu Xun on mothers

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Source: The China Project (5/14/23)
A tribute to mothers
How do we pay homage to mothers who have lost a child? Lu Xun did so by publicizing their sacrifices.
By Eileen J. Cheng

Illustration for The China Project by Alex Santafé

Lǔ Xùn 鲁迅, pen name of Zhōu Shùrén 周树人 (1881-1936), arguably the most famous writer of 20th-century China, was particularly taken with the work of the German artist Käethe Kollwitz (1867-1945). Her woodblock print “Das Opfer” (The Sacrifice/The Victim) spoke to and for Lu Xun when he was grief-stricken after the death of a close friend. In “Remembrance for the Sake of Forgetting” (为了忘却的纪念 wèile wàngquè de jìniàn, 1933), he wrote about the Nationalist government’s execution of the leftist writer Róu Shí 柔石 (1902-1931). On hearing the news, Lu Xun wanted but found himself unable to write an essay commemorating his death. Knowing Rou Shi was devoted to his blind mother, Lu Xun published Kollwitz’s woodblock print “Das Opfer” in a journal, meant as a private tribute to Rou and his mother. But it was also a tribute to Kollwitz herself.

That Lu Xun would be moved by Kollwitz’s art is not surprising. In the late 1920s, Lu Xun became an avid collector and promoter of woodcut art. Inspired by European woodcuts, he sponsored workshops to train young artists in the craft, revitalizing a native art form in the process. His affinity with Kollwitz went beyond an appreciation of her work. Both had leftist sympathies, devoted their art to exposing injustice, and depicted the suffering of the poor and marginalized — grieving mothers among them. Kollwitz’s own story no doubt moved Lu Xun. In 1914, her youngest son died in the battlefield in World War I. “Das Opfer” was Kollwitz’s tribute to those dead from the war and the mothers they left behind. Continue reading →

Workshop on mental and manual labor

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The Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies, Department of Cultural Studies, Center of Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University and East Asian Studies, Johns Hopkins University are organizing the International Workshop on Socialist Industrialization, Deskilling, and Efforts to Diminish the Gap between Mental and Manual Labor in China on 27-28 May, 2023.

Registration link: https://forms.office.com/r/PTDctG92JG

The workshop is inspired by this fundamental question: Does the scale, organization, and technology of modern industry and industrialized agriculture inherently entail exacerbating the separation of mental and manual labor? Scholars from different disciplines are brought together to discuss the efforts to reduce the differences between mental and manual labor in China. It will also examine changes in the ways in which mental and manual labor have been divided and combined in China since the Mao era and in subsequent decades in order to understand deskilling as a global phenomenon and the particular ways in which it has manifested itself in capitalist and socialist factories and farms, as well as the limits of twentieth-century Marxist programs to combine mental and manual labor, and the failure of Marxist promises to eliminate class differences.

The workshop panels will look at a wide range of issues and how they relate to the division of mental and manual labor:

  • Industrial division of labor
  • Gender and the transformation of productive and reproductive labor
  • Education, science, medicine, and literature

Posted by: Heidi Huang heidihuang@ln.edu.hk

May 4th call for resistance deleted by censors

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Source: China Digital Times (5/4/23)
May Fourth Anniversary Call for ‘Resistance against the Powers That Be’ deleted by censors
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A WeChat essay on the “sore need” for a continuation of the May Fourth Movement’s legacy of “resistance against the powers that be,” published on the eve of the movement’s 104th anniversary, was taken down by censors. The essay, by the public account @新新默存, was a reflection on the broader movement that included not just the student protests of May 4, 1919 but also the intellectual awakening that spanned the New Culture Movement, labor movements, and an intellectual-led attempt to transform China’s political and social cultures. It offered a sharp criticism of modern Chinese patriotism, which the author claims emphasizes “collectivism and despotism” and thus is out of line with the original May Fourth spirit of patriotic “individualism and liberalism.” The exact reason any given essay is censored is never revealed by the censors. However, in this case, the culprit (in the censors’ eyes) seems clear: the direct criticism of modern Chinese patriotism and a stirring final two paragraphs that call for the construction of true homes for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” the iconic personifications of the movement’s core ideals. These form a blunt challenge to the Party’s aggressively asserted monopoly on the May Fourth Movement’s legacy.

Today, reviews of the broader May Fourth Movement have reached the common consensus that democracy and science are the most important inheritances it bestowed us with. Au contraire. Just as Yu Ying-shih once said, although Messrs Democracy and Science have long since become naturalized citizens, they’ve yet to find themselves a secure home in China. “Science” is primarily manifested through “Technology,” which is form and not essence. The scientific spirit of truth for its own sake has yet to be fully established. Democracy’s position is such that “it is shown honor but not affection.” Therefore, May Fourth isn’t quite finished yet.

As I see it, the most important inheritances of the May Fourth Movement were the active participation of the masses in politics, resistance against the powers that be, yearning for new discoveries, and the pursuit of equality and freedom for individuals. This is the May Fourth Spirit that is truly worth cherishing. It is a spirit we sorely need right now. [Chinese] Continue reading →

Victims of the Cultural Revolution review

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Source: The China Project (5/4/23)
The battle against amnesia
By Ian Johnson

Illustration for The China Project

For most of her life, Wang Youqin has strived to document victims of the Cultural Revolution, telling their stories without sentimentality or — in many cases, when the victims were also perpetrators of violence — remorse. For the first time, her work is now available in English.

London: Oneworld Academic. £50 / $65. 592 pp.

In 1966, 13-year-old Wáng Yǒuqín 王友琴 watched as some of her classmates at an elite girls’ school in Beijing tortured their teachers. Egged on by the violent directives of the country’s top leaders, the girls forced the teachers to eat dirt, poured boiling water over them, and beat them with spiked clubs. Later, in the school cafeteria, they boasted about it. That night, one of the teachers died of her injuries. Others committed suicide. Some were left crippled.

Horrified, Wang wasn’t sure what to do and kept the experience bottled up. Like many of her peers, she was later forced to labor in the countryside, where she saw the failure of Mao’s revolution to provide farmers with enough to eat. After Mao’s death, she and most other sent-down youth were allowed to return to Beijing. Unable to speak out about the failings of the era, she confronted anguish and guilt in the only way she knew how: by recording the names and details of those who died. Continue reading →

HK’s memory is being erased

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Source: NYT (4/25/23)
Opinion: Hong Kong’s Memory Is Being Erased
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
By Louisa Lim (Ms. Lim, who was a journalist in China and Hong Kong for 13 years, is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne.)

A man, his back to the camera, looking at a foggy Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong. A small Hong Kong flag flies on a short pole nearby.

Credit…Jerome Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock

The group of about 80 protesters wore numbered lanyards around their necks and cordoned themselves off with tape as they marched, like a crime scene in motion.

This odd spectacle last month was Hong Kong’s first authorized protest in three years — highly choreographed, surveilled and regulated, even though it was not an explicitly antigovernment demonstration, and a world away from the crowds that thronged streets in 2019 to protest China’s tightening grip on the city. One participant said the protesters, who were opposed to a land reclamation project, were “herded like sheep.”

It was just one example of how Hong Kong, a global, tech-savvy city whose protests were once livestreamed around the world, is being transformed. But authorities aren’t merely choking off future protest; they are attempting to rewrite Hong Kong’s history.

Revisionism — with its ancillary altering or obliteration of memory — is an act of repression. It’s the same playbook China used after violently crushing the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. Then, state-induced amnesia was imposed gradually. At first the government churned out propaganda that labeled those protests as a counterrevolutionary rebellion that had to be suppressed. But over the years, the state slowly excised all public memory of its killings. Continue reading →

East Turkistan’s Right to Sovereignty

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New Publication: East Turkistan’s Right to Sovereignty: Decolonization and Beyond
by Rukiye Turdush
Rowan and Littlefield / Lexington Books

In this new book, Rukiye Turdush shows how East Turkestan, in Chinese often known as Xinjiang (“New Frontier” of the Chinese empire), was conquered and turned into a settler colony. Post-WWII decolonization, as happened in Africa and elsewhere, never touched it. These are striking arguments given the current vogue of discussions of decolonization in other contexts. This Chinese situation is especially interesting today not least because the Chinese Communist Party, before they took power in China in 1949, solemnly promised that if they came into power, they would grant freedom of secession and independence to all peoples conquered by the previous Chinese Empires.   –yrs. Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Abstract:

This study examines the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the people of East Turkistan; specifically, between China’s settler colonialism and East Turkistan’s independence movement. What distinguishes this study is its dispassionate analysis of the East Turkistan’s national dilemma in terms of international law and legal precedent as well as the prudence with which it distinguishes substantial evidence from claims of China’s crimes against humanity and genocide in East Turkistan that have not been fully verified yet. Continue reading →