History

posts related to modern Chinese history

Chongzhen Emperor book withdrawn

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China Digital Times (10/18/23)
Xi Parallels Suspected behind Withdrawal of Book on Ill-Fated Chongzhen Emperor
By 

On October 16, it was reported online that a recent reprint of the historical biography “The Chongzhen Emperor: Diligent Ruler of a Failed Dynasty” (《崇祯：勤政的亡国君》Chóngzhēn: Qínzhèng de Wángguó Jūn, ISBN 9787549640775) had been recalled by the book distributor Dook Media Group (读客文化, Dúkè Wénhuà). A notice from the distributor stated that due to an unspecified “printing problem,” the book was being recalled from the shelves of all online booksellers, Xinhua bookstores, and private bookstores. At present, the cover image of the book is no longer displayed on online platforms, and the hashtag #Chongzhen has been search-censored on Weibo, with searches only showing content from verified users.

Continue reading Chongzhen Emperor book withdrawn →

Chinese Revolution in Practice

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New Publication
Chinese Revolution in Practice: From Movement to the State, by Guo Wu
Routledge, 2023

Description:

This book employs multiple case studies to explore how the Chinese communist revolution began as an ideology-oriented intellectual movement aimed at improving society before China’s transformation into a state that suppresses dissenting voices by outsourcing its power of coercion and incarceration.

The author examines the movement’s methods of early self-organization, grass-roots level engagement, creation of new modes of expression and popular art forms, manipulation of collective memory, and invention of innovative ways of mass incarceration. Covering developments from 1920 to 1970, the book considers a wide range of Chinese individuals and groups, from early Marxists to political prisoners in the PRC, to illustrate a dynamic, interactive process in which the state and individuals contend with each other. It argues that revolutionary practices in modern China have created a regime that can be conceptualized as an “ideology-military-propaganda” state that prompts further reflection on the relationships between revolution and the state, the state and collective articulation and memory, and the state and reflective individuals in a global context.

Illustrating the continuity of the Chinese revolution and past decades’ socialist practices and mechanisms, this study is an ideal resource for scholars of Chinese history, politics, and twentieth-century revolutions. Continue reading Chinese Revolution in Practice →

Underground Historians

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Source: NYT (9/21/23)
China Keeps Trying to Crush Them. Their Movement Keeps Growing.
By Ian Johnson (Mr. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent two decades in China)

Credit…Illustration by Linda Huang; source photograph by Tsering Dorje

In 1959, a group of university students in the northwestern Chinese city of Tianshui embarked on a quixotic plan. China was in the midst of the Great Famine, a catastrophe caused by government policies that would kill as many as 45 million. These young people had witnessed farmers starving to death and cannibalism; they also saw how the government had brutally punished or killed people who appealed for help. They felt someone needed to do something to spread word of what was happening. They decided to publish a journal.

The students called it Spark, after a Chinese expression, “xinghuo liaoyuan,” or “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” They hand-wrote the essays onto plates and, with the help of local officials, used a mimeograph machine to run off copies.

At just eight pages, and with no photos or graphics, Spark looked primitive. But it was filled with articles that got to the heart of China’s authoritarian politics — then and now: Farmers weren’t allowed to own property, all of which belonged to the state; top leaders brooked no opposition; corruption was endemic; and even critics loyal to the regime were persecuted. The lead article on the first page set the tone: Continue reading Underground Historians →

Kingdom of Characters review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Gina Anne Tam’s review of Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/gina-tam/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Kingdom of Characters:
The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

By Jing Tsu

Reviewed by Gina Anne Tam

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2023)

Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern New York: Riverhead Books, 2022. xix + 314 pp. ISBN: 9780735214736​ (Paperback); 9780735214729 (Hardcover); 9780735214743​ (E-book)

Jing Tsu believes that Americans do not understand China well. With an eye on deteriorating US-China relations in the past several years, the prolific literary scholar has repeatedly made public her concern about the information gap between China and the West, a reality she sees as increasingly dangerous. Scholars who have deep, lived experience in China, she contends, have an increasingly important responsibility. She states that the “days of armchair scholarship are over,” instead imploring fellow specialists to do all we can to help readers understand China on its own terms—as a place that is textured and complicated, not a two-dimensional caricature of a dangerous and threatening hegemon.[1]

It was to further this goal that Tsu wrote Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, a work that has topped best-seller lists and gained widespread attention by mainstream audiences around the world. The book is a history of Chinese language modernization as told through several compelling biographies placed vividly into the context of the tumultuous history of China’s twentieth century. It is meant, Tsu purports, to help bridge the understanding gap between the average American and citizens of China. Language, she believes, is a vector through which we can understand China today—from the state processes that control and shape culture, to the economics of technological advancement, to ideas about foreignness, nativity, and power. Continue reading Kingdom of Characters review →

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 Diasporic Chinese Museums talk series →

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 The Longest Transitional Justice →

‘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 ‘Eliminating the emperor’s cronies’ →

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 The World of Xi Jinping’s Court →

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 How a massacre shaped China’s media →

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 New Tiananmen exhibit in NYC →

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 China’s Hidden Century exhibit →

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 Lu Xun on mothers →

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