Liu Shihui, a lawyer from Inner Mongolia now living in Guangzhou, and Chengdu-based activist Chen Yunfei told the Post they were stopped by plainclothes state security officials on a road leading to Lin’s grave. They said they had been ruffed up and insulted by the plainclothes officials, who also deleted photos on their phones.

“Last year, I went to the grave and no one stopped me,” said Chen.

“This year it seems to have become a sensitive issue. They are trying to tarnish Xi Jingping’s constitutional Chinese dream,” he said, referring to a slogan by the new president that stirred hope among liberals for an unprecedented enforcement of rights guaranteed in the constitution.

[…] About a hundred people managed to get to the grave site, where they were met by just as many police officers, urban management officials and plainclothes state police, said 40-year-old Chen Zongyao from Wenzhou. “We were allowed to light incense, but not allowed to speak,” he said. “We are trying to go up to the grave again tomorrow.”

Scene at Lin Zhao’s grave in Suzhou today RT @wbchczy 四二九苏州灵岩山.奠林昭现场 twitter.com/wbchczy/status…

— Joshua Rosenzweig (@siweiluozi) April 29, 2013

Scores of Chinese visited dissident Lin Zhao’s tomb today on the anniversary of her death, w/ police loitering nearby twitter.com/Yuxin_Gao/stat…

— Helen Gao (@Yuxin_Gao) April 29, 2013

At The Washington Post (via Austin Ramzy), Philip Pan tells Lin’s story through that of filmmaker Hu Jie in an extract from his book, Out of Mao’s Shadow.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cultural Revolution, dissidents, execution, history, Lin Zhao, Mao era, writers
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They are most unlikely symbols of Chinese national pride, made by foreigners as part of a Western-style fountain, for the amusement of an emperor belonging to a dynasty overthrown in 1911 for being corrupt and “foreign.” Yet over the last decade, 12 bronze animal heads have become a sore spot for the entire nation. Now, after a high-profile donation, the whole sorry saga might finally be over.

[…] This outcome may be seen as a victory by China’s most rabid nationalists, or by the tourists who go to international museums to see their country’s relics, and decry their presence outside of the country. Often they assume that they are all stolen, but it is worth remembering that the art market, black or otherwise, has existed for a long time. Not everything that is abroad got there by being looted.

Take the bronze heads, which were already in storage when the Yuanmingyuan was sacked. We know that the clock mechanism soon broke down, and it was up to the eunuchs to pump water manually every time the emperor was passing in front of the statues. Shortly after the death of Qianlong, during the reign of his son Jiaqing, the Empress Xiaoshurui asked for the heads to be removed—she found them hideous. They lay in storage for a long time. By some accounts that is when they disappeared, probably sold off by eunuchs.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: France, history, Old Summer Palace, Opium War, sculpture
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Grand Canal barges have no fancy names, no mermaids planted on the bow, no corny sayings painted on the stern. Instead they have letters and numbers stamped on the side, like the brand on a cow. Such an unsentimental attitude might suggest unimportance, but barges plying the Grand Canal have knit China together for 14 centuries, carrying grain, soldiers, and ideas between the economic heartland in the south and the political capitals in the north.

[...]Canal people, known as chuanmin, re-create village life on their $100,000 barges. Like farmers at harvest time, the small crews—generally just one family—start at dawn and go till evening, when they tie up their boats next to each other. Old Zhu’s wife, Huang Xiling, now posted at the stern, had given birth to the family’s two sons on earlier barges. She cooked, cleaned, and made the boat’s little cabin a retreat from the water, wind, and sun. “The men say these boats are just a tool for making money, but our lives are spent on them,” she said. “You have so many memories.”

[...]Chuanmin rarely indulge themselves. They live by the hard-nosed calculations that determine whether a family gets rich or is ruined. This was driven home to me at the end of our first day. I was chatting with Zheng Chengfang, who came from the same village as Old Zhu. Our boats were tied up together, and I’d hopped over to visit with him. Wasn’t it a wonderful sight, I said to Zheng as we surveyed Old Zhu’s boat, freshly painted and gleaming in the sunset?

“No, no, no, you don’t understand us,” he blurted out. “It’s not a question of good. We chuanmin need the boats, or we can’t survive.”

Xinhua reported this week that the tomb of Emperor Yang of Sui, the ancient ruler credited with building the Grand Canal, may have been discovered not far from the banks of his legacy:

Chinese archaeologists said that a tomb unearthed in east Jiangsu Province might be the final resting place of an emperor known for his tyrannous reign about 1,500 years ago.

The 20-square-meter tomb in Yangzhou City might belong to Yang Guang, or Emperor Yang of Sui, the second and last monarch of the short-lived Sui Dynasty (581-618), according to the city’s cultural heritage bureau.

[...]A notorious tyrant in China’s history, Yang Guang made millions of workers build palaces and luxury leisure boats. His legacy includes the Grand Canal, which was later increased to connect Beijing and Hangzhou in the world’s longest artificial waterway.

The emperor was killed during a mutiny in 618 AD, which marked the end of the Sui Dynasty and may explain the relatively small scale of the extravagant emperor’s tomb, researchers said.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: archaeology, Chinese history, Grand Canal, history, ian johnson, Jiangsu, tombs
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As reporters gather in Seoul to await the latest hostile missive (or missile) from the North, Western governments have continued to press China to do more to rein in their putative ally. Like a pit pull chained in the front yard, North Korea does keep the neighbours on edge. Of course there is always the danger of what might happen if you neglect to feed the dog.

China’s involvement on the Korean peninsula in the period since the Korean war has been cited amply in recent press accounts. But Beijing’s interests there have historical roots which reach back far earlier than 1950. For more than two thousand years, successive Chinese dynasties have seen Korea as a tributary to be protected, a prize to be coveted, or as a dangerous land bridge which might convey “outer barbarians” into China. Unsurprising then that China should have a long history of mucking about in Korean politics, a history which has often brought it into conflict with that other great Eastern power, Japan. This has seldom worked out well for the Korean people. Nor has it led to much joy for China.

[…] The misgivings felt by Koreans watching outside forces—particularly China and Japan—intervening to solve problems on the peninsula is understandable, against the historical backdrop. As is China’s reluctance to commit itself to managing Pyongyang. Today’s deadlock is both a legacy of the cold war and the latest chapter in a long story of power shifts across East Asia.

At Tea Leaf Nation last week, Taylor Washburn focused on the disputed status of the first-millennium “proto-Korean” kingdom of Goguryeo:

In late January, 2013, South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper reported that an elite group of scholars in the northeastern Chinese province of Jilin was conducting “closed research” on a freshly discovered stele, an engraved memorial stone dating to the fifth century A.D. What interest could the examination of such an artifact hold for contemporary Korean readers? “Concerns are being raised,” the Hankyoreh piece noted vaguely, “that […] it is very likely that China will use the results of the study … to reinforce its argument that Goguryeo belongs to China.”

[…] Whatever defensive instincts may have inspired China’s Goguryeo revisionism, efforts to downplay the independence of Korean civilization cannot but appear menacing from across the Yellow Sea. In a 2012 poll, nearly three quarters of South Koreans indicated that they perceive China as a military threat. Although some of this growing fear undoubtedly stems from Beijing’s ongoing support for Pyongyang, it also reflects a deeper anxiety that a stronger China will seek to revive elements of the Sinocentric regional order that prevailed in East Asia before the arrival of Westerners and the ascent of Meiji Japan, under which Korea’s rulers paid tribute to the Manchu Qing.

If the current Chinese investigation of the Jilin stele continues to make news in Korea, it will certainly exacerbate such unease. What remains to be seen is whether Beijing, mindful of its own security imperatives, will determine this a price worth paying. For the moment, at least, the ghosts of Goguryeo can rest. But William Faulkner’s familiar observation is as true of Manchuria as Mississippi: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cold War, history, Korea, North Korea, North Korea relations, south korea, South Korea relations
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Older Chinese, especially those now in their fifties or sixties, often seem like immigrants in their own country. They have that same sense of disorientation, of struggling with societal norms and mores they don’t quite grasp, and of clinging to little alcoves of their own kind. In their relationships with their children, they remind me of the parents of the Indian and Bangladeshi kids I grew up with, struggling to advise their children about choices they never had to make. Yet for all the dissonance that geographical dislocation creates, the distance between a Bangladeshi village and a Manchester suburb is, if anything, smaller than that between rural China in the 1970s and modern Beijing.

Immigrants often have a stable set of values from their home culture from which to draw sustenance, whether religious or cultural. But for the children of the Cultural Revolution in China, there’s been no such continuity. They were raised to believe in the revolutionary Maoism of the 1960s and ’70s, and then told as young adults in the late 1970s that everything drilled into them in their adolescence had been a terrible mistake. Then they were fed a trickle of socialism, rapidly belied by the rush to get rich, and finally offered the hint of a liberal counter-culture in the 1980s before Tiananmen snatched it away. In the meantime, traditional values condemned as ‘counter-revolutionary’ in their youth are being given a quick polish and propped up as the new backbone of society by the authorities.

[…] However, while the relationships between the post-1980 generation and their parents are fraught with bitterness — whether over careers, houses or marriage — the distance between them and their grandparents is, curiously, much smaller. ‘My grandmother took my ambitions to be a journalist seriously,’ said Lin Meilian. ‘And she was the first person to teach me English, from when I was very small. I had so much more in common with her than my mother.’

Lin continued: ‘My grandmother grew up in the 1930s and ’40s, when China was much closer to the world, and so she understood how I see things.’ It was a sentiment widely echoed, and not just because of the usual grandparental affections. The cosmopolitanism and potential of a time before China closed its gates bridged generations, but so did the willingness of grandparents to talk about their past.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cultural Revolution, filial piety, history, inequality, job market, marriage, meritocracy, post 80s, reform and opening, values
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The defendant, from Zhejiang province in east China, was accused of killing a man he believed was a spy in 1967, according to an online report by the state-run China News Service that was later deleted.

The man, named only as Mr Qiu, stands accused of using a piece of rope to strangle his victim, who was named as Dr. Gong. After committing the murder, Mr Qiu allegedly hacked off the man’s legs and buried his body.

While the alleged murder took place more than four decades ago, Mr Qiu was reportedly only arrested in July last year. He was put on trial this week at his home in Zhejiang. So far no verdict has been made public.

The story had already reached several large news sites and web portals by the time China News Service removed the story from its web site, according to the South China Morning Post. The Wall Street Journal reports that news of the trial has sent ripples through Chinese social media:

Unlike with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 or the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, the Communist Party has tolerated a certain amount of discussion of the Cultural Revolution. Numerous stories of the brutal violence the country’s youth perpetrated on their elders and each other have earned the approval of censors, creating a body of cathartic “scar literature” and its cinematic equivalent, “scar film.”

Still, very few of the crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution were prosecuted—an omission some Internet users were happy to see addressed in Mr. Qiu’s case.

“Every Cultural Revolution criminal should be resolutely pursued and held responsible. Murderers, instigators – not a single one should be left behind,” wrote one anonymous user of Sina Corp. Weibo microblogging service. “They can be treated leniently, but they must be made to take responsibility. Only then will we truly be able to come to terms with the Cultural Revolution.”

Many, however, criticized the pursuit of Mr. Qiu, arguing that there were others more deserving of punishment for the blood spilled in that era.

“The prime culprits of the Cultural Revolution get away scot free and decades later they chase down a minor murderer,” wrote Liu Xiaoyuan, a Beijing-based lawyer. “There were so many homicides during the Cultural Revolution, to pursue one little old man is a failure of judicial justice and political wisdom.”

Did Kirsten Tatlow wrote in The New York Times on Thursday that “some are angry that a little guy is being punished, and not the masterminds of the violence:”

“Have the main culprits who started the Cultural Revolution been punished?” asked a person with the handle Sansu dage, who added an angry red face to the posting.

“Actually, the biggest criminals of the Cultural Revolution have not been held responsible,” wrote a person with the handle Keji huangdan menwei chuangxin. “To pursue an ordinary criminal, decades later, is absurd.”

A_Jing wrote: “There should be mandatory courses in universities to talk clearly about the crimes against humanity during the Cultural Revolution!”

Wrote another: “All the cases from the Cultural Revolution should be tried.”

Read also about the memoirs of businesswoman Ping Fu, which contained personal accounts from the Cultural Revolution and caused controversy over its authenticity.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China News Service, Cultural Revolution, history, microblogs, murder, online public opinion, sina weibo, Zhejiang
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[...]Meanwhile, press coverage of Fu and her book was almost exclusively as uncritical as it was patronising, led by The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Forbes as well as others.

Exhaustive attempts were made in comment sections to explain the issue, but Fu’s supporters appeared unwilling to listen. Even senior Reuters editor Harold Evans (and husband of Daily Beast founder Tina Brown) turned out to vouch for Fu, calling online appeals to reason a persecution.

Of course by this time actual internet trolls, the ones who fabricate China’s history in the opposite direction, had joined in, but all of this appeared lost on Fu’s unquestioning cheerleaders who, variously, dismissed all the feedback as an attack by Chinese internet vigilantes, a coordinated smear campaign against Fu, now placed high “on the vituperative frontline of cyber hostilities between China and the West”.[...]

In his post, Kennedy points to a recent article from The Guardian, in which experts are quoted casting their academically informed doubt over many of Fu’s claims, a few of which are listed below:

[...]Fu also says she was arrested and criticised by Suzhou University authorities after Deng Xiaoping, then China’s paramount leader, met student publishers. She says Deng had seen a daring article from the popular magazine she edited.

Perry Link, an expert on modern Chinese literature at the University of California at Riverside, said student magazine representatives met in 1979, but added: “I do not believe for a moment that Deng Xiaoping ever came near the group.”

[...]The entrepreneur claims she was ordered to leave China after exposing female infanticide in the early 80s, writing that in a few months of research she “witnessed with her own eyes” drowned and suffocated female infants. Last month, she told a radio station she watched “hundreds of baby girls being killed in front of my eyes. I saw girls being tossed into the river.”

Therese Hesketh of University College London, an expert on population controls in China, said: “I have never heard stories of this kind. Infanticide did of course occur, but was not commonplace … It certainly was not done in public as even at that time to be caught meant a possible murder charge.”

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: controversy, Cultural Revolution, history, immigrants, nationalism, Ping Fu, U.S. immigration
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“I knew they were coming for me,” says Ping Fu. It was 1966, the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao Zedong, and she was 8 years old. “I heard this huge noise in the courtyard and saw the Red Guard. Then I heard my mom crying, saying, ‘She’s so little.’ They grabbed me. I wasn’t even given a chance to hug my mom. I was taken away from Shanghai, the only home I knew.”

Taken from her parents, Fu was left to fend for herself and her younger sister in a government-run dormitory in Nanjing, China, where she lived for nearly a decade. There, she was brainwashed, starved, tortured and gang raped, becoming a factory worker and without proper schooling. Years later, when the schools reopened, Fu began rebuilding her life as a student at Suzhou University. It was short-lived. A few months before graduation, her senior thesis research on female infanticide in China’s countryside caught the attention of the national press. She was imprisoned and sentenced to exile.

Fu began her life in America broke, alone and knowing only three words of English. She put herself through school doing odd jobs and eventually earned a computer science degree, setting her up to become a leading innovator in the early dot-com era. In 1997, she launched tech firm Geomagic with her husband, creating 3D software to customize product manufacturing, from personalized shoes and prosthetic limbs to NASA spaceship repairs. By 2005, it had $30 million in revenues, and she was named Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. [...]

Two days later, Forbes posted a translation of the piece to their Chinese-language website, prompting many Chinese netizens to express doubt over the authenticity of Fu’s account. Forbes’ follow-up to the original piece, which also attracted negative comments, summarizes the critique:

Since the publication of my piece, first in English and then in Chinese on ForbesChina.com, along with coverage by other media outlets serious questions have been raised in the Chinese blogosphere and elsewhere about Fu’s credibility.

Writers on my blog have been critical too. Commenter Fugang Sun wrote: “I experienced Culture Revolution and know a lot horrific stories happened in that era in person…. However, most of the stories listed in article are faked.” In the same vein, another skeptical commenter wrote: “There are already many voices questioning the validity of Ms. Fu’s story. From my view and experience it may very well be what it is: a story.”

[...]It also raised eyebrows that she said she had been exiled or deported from China, when there is no official record of it. When I asked her to address it, Fu says “exile” is not the correct word, despite that it’s used in the press release being sent to media members to promote her memoir. The release first states “Ping was deported,” and later repeats “Ping was exiled.”

The torrent of criticism quickly poured onto the customer review section of the book’s Amazon page after microbloggers issued a call-to-arms [zh] encouraging English-speaking peers to post negative one-star reviews (as of this morning, 394 of 500 reviews give the book a one-star rating.) The Daily Beast reports on the “Amazon blitz”:

As of press time, it rated 1.6 out of 5 stars, with 315 out of 377 reviewers giving it the lowest possible one star, often under such headlines as “Absolutely a liar” and “A good book only on April 1st.” Under Amazon’s reviewing system, most of the critics were able to weigh in under a pen name—but many appeared to be non-native English speakers with a knowledge of Chinese history. “Only those cant [sic] read chinese and not familiar with modern chinese history will believe the story,” wrote one. “She had [sic] talked this fake story too many times,” added another. “Her father and my father worked together in the university since 50s until they retired … Ping Fu was also a Red Guard herself!” blasted a third.

On February 1, China Daily’s Chinese portal posted an article about Fu’s “exaggerations,” including a picture seeming to substantiate claims that she was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution [zh]. The article was widely forwarded on Sina Weibo. Meanwhile, notorious (and controversial) Chinese “myth-buster” and academic watchdog Fang Zhouzi dug into previous media coverage of Fu to weigh in, blasting Fu’s claims one by one. South China Morning Post’s Jon Kennedy reports:

First up, Fu’s claim she was sent to a labour camp at age 8 or 9 with her younger sister where for the duration of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she was kept apart from her parents, brainwashed, starved, tortured, gang-raped, forced into child labour and deprived of education.

Fu would have been a minor throughout the Cultural Revolution, Fang points out, never mind her younger sister; children that young being forced into labour camps was unheard of: “I haven’t seen this in anyone else’s memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, it must have been a tragic experience had only by Ping Fu herself.”

As for Fu’s claim of being deprived of education those ten years, Fang points out that in 1977 – when the holding of university entrance examinations resumed and Fu was accepted by Suzhou University – not only were all applicants get pre-screened for eligibility, but also less than 5 per cent of applicants were accepted that year. “Was she a prodigy?,” he asks.[...]

[...]Noting Fu told Forbes she arrived in the United States knowing only three words of English, Fang remembered hearing the same anecdote in interviews she’d given to other media, so he went back and checked and found different sets of those first three words:

Inc.: Please, thank you, help;
Bend, Not Break: Thank you, hello, help;
NPR: Thank you, help, excuse me.

Ping Fu and her publishers were quoted in the Daily Beast post (above) expressing concern that much of the criticism was being hurled by people who hadn’t read the book, as it is not available in China. Fu herself published a response on Huffington Post, answering each point of critique individually:

Why did you say you were in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution?

I did not say or write that I was in a labor camp; I stated that I lived for 10 years in a university dormitory on the NUAA campus. Chinese children don’t get put in labor camps. I also did not say I was a factory worker. I said Mao wanted us to study and learn from farmers, soldiers and workers.

If you were deprived of an education for those 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, and less than 5 percent of applicants were accepted when universities reopened, how did you get in? Were you a prodigy?

After 1972, school resumed (p. 128). We had few formal classes at my school at the edge of Nanjing in an industrial area. I studied nonstop (pp. 229-231) and was known by my family as “the girl who never turns off her lights.” (p. 231)

Suzhou University did not reopen until 1982. How could you go there in 1977?

A: This is a typo in the book (p. 232). I took the college entrance exams in 1977 and 1978, and was admitted in 1978. When I entered, I believe it was called Jiangsu Teachers College or Jiangsu Teachers University. Its name changed to Suzhou University before I left; it was the same university in the same location.

[...]You claim you were brutally gang-raped. Gang rape doesn’t happen in China.

A: Rape is a very private matter and this definitely happened. I know this was not a hallucination. I have scars. My body was broken.

Click through to read Fu’s entire response.

In much of the recent English media coverage citing Fu and her publishers (including Fu’s own response), the point that this book is a memoir is emphasized, as is the subjectivity of memory. The Guardian reports:

“When I was young, these are the stories being told to us and in my nightmares they come back again and again. That time was so traumatic. I was taken away from my parents,” [Fu] said.

But she now accepts that her imagination may have played tricks. “Somehow in my mind I always thought I saw it, but now I’m not sure my memory served me right. I probably saw it in a movie or something, and I acknowledge that’s a problem.”

[...]Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Portfolio books, Penguin’s business imprint, said he stood by Bend Not Break, adding that he had “absolute confidence” in Fu and her memoir. “I have no doubts that the book is substantially correct and that attempts to pick apart elements of it are political attacks.”

Zackheim said Portfolio had no plans to look into the veracity of the book. “This is a memoir of a woman’s life, it’s not a work of journalism. Are there errors in the book? I can’t say, but if there are they are errors of memory.”

Currently, Fu’s Bend, Not Break is #24 on the New York Times Best Sellers nonfiction list.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: controversy, Cultural Revolution, Fang Zhouzi, history, human flesh search engines, immigrants, nationalism, Ping Fu, PRC history, Red Guards, U.S. immigration, U.S. relations
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On January 29-30, 2013 one of the top ten micro-blogs in Sina Weibo, the most influential micro-blogging platform in China, has a set of historical photos showing two versions of the Chinese history during Mao’s Era (1949-1976).

The micro-blog, in the form of a collage, published by @Pongyoung with a brief comment: “How history has been amended?”, has been retweeted 13362 times with 2237 comments within one day. The photos and their explanation were originally published by the history channel [zh] of ifeng.com.

In order to help our readers see the difference between the two versions of the Chinese history, I cut the collage into 10 photo sets with a brief explanation.[...]

The missing person is Peng Zhen, also once a CCP leader. He was purged during the Cultural Revolution for opposing Mao’s views on the role of literature in relation to the state.[...]

See the whole gallery at Global Voices.

For more on selective portrayals of history, see “At China’s New Museum, History Toes the Party Line” via CDT. Also see prior CDT coverage of propaganda and historical revisionism.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP history, history, Mao Zedong, PRC history, propaganda, revisionism
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China’s more assertive foreign policy over the last two years has played a key role in getting two arch-conservatives — Japan’s Shinzo Abe and South Korea’s Park Geun-hye — elected to lead their respective countries. Some Chinese observers believe that Abe and Park will be forced by China’s inexorable rise to come to terms with their giant neighbor. Don’t count on it. To much of its region, China’s behavior as it is coming of age as a modern superpower is eerily reminiscent of its past policy as a regional hegemon.

For a very long time, imperial China dominated its wider region. The Chinese imperial court considered itself the indispensable center of a regional order in which China had the right and the duty to set international norms and standards, and to intervene if these were broken. It was an ideological system in which Chinese principles had to be the starting point for all things.

[…] China needs to learn from its past that a good foreign policy must be more than only seeking what is best for one’s country to the detriment of others. It is rather to seek to create a region, and eventually a world, where as many as possible believe that China’s rise can also be to their own advantage.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Scott A. Snyder, on the other hand, suggests that Park’s election might actually offer an opportunity for a fresh start in Sino-South Korean relations. At Bloomberg last October, Pankaj Mishra examined the argument that neighboring countries’ historical experience has left them well equipped to deal with a resurgent China.

At Foreign Policy, meanwhile, Stephen M. Walt summarizes his arguments from a recent Harvard-Peking University joint conference on Sino-U.S. relations, arguing that both China and the United States should exercise restraint in the pursuit of their respective strategic goals.

[…] If Chinese leaders are consistently smart, judicious, farsighted, clear-eyed, and wise, and if their American counterparts consistently exhibit similar qualities, then the two governments may be able to manage their future relations without serious trouble. But the history of both countries suggests that there is very little chance that these idyllic circumstances will prevail every year for the next several decades. Sooner or later, we are bound to get a cadre of foolish, impetuous, or incompetent leaders in one capital or the other, or maybe even both at the same time. If “wise leadership” is the prerequisite for managing Sino-American rivalry over the long haul, in short, history suggests one ought to worry. A lot.

The bottom line is that Washington and Beijing have an obvious interest in taking steps now that might make their relationship easier to manage in the future. In particular, establishing rules of the road for naval activity (similar to the earlier Incidents at Sea agreement) might reduce the danger of an unintended clash on the high seas. Reaching an understanding on the use of unmanned drones or cyberattacks would help too. Military-to-military contacts and other forms of elite exchange would be a good idea as well, so that elites in both societies know the people with whom they are dealing personally and are less likely to misread or misinterpret what they may do while in official positions. None of these steps makes rivalry disappear, but together they could help keep it from boiling over.

And that just might be the greatest contribution that these two states could make to international peace and security over the next 25 years.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: East Asia, foreign policy, history, Japan, Japan relations, Shinzo Abe, south korea, South Korea relations, U.S. relations, United States
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Artist: BrickWeave

New Internet regulations, announced by state media in the final days of 2012, threaten to stifle the vibrant world of the Chinese netizenry. The regulations, which include required real-name registration for all Internet users, were announced in a December 18 People’s Daily editorial, which was in turn covered by CCTV’s primetime news show, News Simulcast (新闻联播 Xīnwén Liánbō). Twisting the CCTV report, BrickWeave casts disgraced politician Lei Zhengfu as the News Simulcast anchor in the mock segment “Netizens Call for Legislation to Protect Online Information.” Ordinary people have exposed corrupt officials like Lei through Weibo, forcing the authorities to do more firing and apologizing than they could have imagined before microblogging began.

Artist: Simon

“Don’t… don’t! I just want to write a weibo…” What exactly does real-name registration mean for Chinese Internet users? Officials say people will still be able to use nicknames online, but that offers little protection from identity theft. South Korea provides a sobering example of who mosts benefits from an online real-name registration system. The ninja inspectors going through this man’s pockets could be government regulators–or cyber-criminals.

Artist: Tango

Be careful what you wish for. A netizen-turned-puppet asks for a little freedom, but the very tool which could liberate him is used to control him instead.

Artist: Yuanzi

In “Getting Rich Through Hard Work” (劳动致富), ordinary men fish for their fair share–but the official, sitting on his throne at the tip of the iceberg, has cast his lines with something else in mind. The online public boiled with rage last year at the luxury watches, designer suits, and Italian cars sported by officials at all levels of the government food chain. Bo Xilai’s humble US$1600 monthly salary was apparently more than enough to send his son to Harrow and Oxford. “Watch Brother” was identified wearing at least 11 different watches in various photos. Guangzhou official Cai Bin was caught owning 21 houses, 20 more than the legal limit. The list goes on.

Artist: Fenzi

This menacing Pinocchio is not ashamed of the florid lie sprouting from his nose. Like a propaganda poster from the Great Leap Forward, it glorifies a bounty that never existed. Retired journalist Yang Jisheng has just published Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, the fruit of 20 years of research about the horrors of the Great Famine of 1960-1962. In Foreign Policy, Murong Xuecun writes that the crucial debate in China today is not how the famine happened, but whether it happened at all. He references Frank Dikötter’s landmark book Mao’s Great Famine, which estimates “‘at least’ 45 million premature deaths.” But, says Murong, “the people who spoke the truth are all dead.” Dikötter also examines the country’s collective amnesia in Foreign Policy.

Artist: Padme

What does the New Year have in store for China? Will the Party hold the country together, or will an explosive situation of its own making finally burst forth? The first controversy of 2013 has already charged ahead, as Southern Weekly’s editorial calling on China to uphold its constitution was torn to shreds by the censors. Some people like Eric X. Li may argue that the “China model” offers an alternative success story to democratization, but as China’s economy slows and middle-class discontent grows, it’s clear the whole story has yet to be told.

Browse CDT Chinese’s cartoon collection on Google+.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Drawing the News, famine, Frank Dikötter, great leap forward, history, Internet censorship, Internet regulation, lei zhengfu, Murong Xuecun, News Simulcast, official corruption, political cartoons, political humor, real name registration, Yang Jisheng
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A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village’s 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.

[…] Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.

[…] The death toll is staggering. “The most officials have admitted is 20 million,” he says, but he puts the total at 36 million. It is “equivalent to 450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki … and greater than the number of people killed in the first world war,” he writes. Many think even this is a conservative figure: in his acclaimed book Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikotter estimates that the toll reached at least 45 million.

At Foreign Policy, Dikötter describes the almost total absence from available archives of any photographic record of the famine:

I read through thousands of documents: secret reports from the Public Security Bureaus, detailed minutes of top party meetings, investigations into cases of mass murder, inquiries compiled by special teams tasked with determining the extent of the catastrophe, secret opinion surveys, and letters of complaint written by ordinary citizens. Some were neatly written in longhand, others typed out on flimsy, yellowing paper. Some were excruciating to read, for instance, a report written by an investigation team noting the case of a boy in a Hunan village who had been caught stealing a handful of grain. A local Communist Party cadre forced his father to bury the boy alive. The father died of grief a few days later.

[…] For four years, I studied Mao’s famine, and only once have I seen a visual illustration of its awfulness. In 2009, I visited a historian in a drab concrete building in the suburbs of Beijing. He, too, had been working on the history of the Great Leap Forward, burrowing in archives for more than a decade and obsessively documenting the starvation that had decimated the region of his birth, a county barely 100 miles north of Mao’s hometown in Hunan. Stacks of photocopied archival material bulged out of filing cabinets in his sparse office. I asked him whether he had ever seen a photograph of the famine. He frowned and reluctantly pulled out a folder with a reproduction of the only picture he had discovered. It came from the files of the party committee in his home county and was from a police investigation into a case of cannibalism. The small, fading picture showed a young man standing against a brick wall, peering straight into the camera, seemingly emotionless. By his feet stood a large pot containing the parts of a young boy, his head and limbs severed from his body.

Another visual record of the period has survived, however. A slideshow of Great Leap Forward-era propaganda posters at Foreign Policy shows smiling farmers and bumper harvests. These images helped preserve the illusion that Yang Jisheng himself laboured under for many years: that starvation was local, and deaths were isolated tragedies, rather than part of a wider catastrophe of the government’s making.

Foreign Policy also hosts an article, translated by Martin Merz, in which Murong Xuecun angrily discusses present day arguments over the causes, extent and reality of the famine, and the government’s continued efforts to control the narrative. He writes scathingly about Chinese youth’s supposedly unquestioning acceptance of official information, and blames the Party’s stifling influence for this, the polarised recent debate over the famine, and other evils (“in which case he’s in for a nasty shock if he ever leaves China“, as Jamie K commented at Blood and Treasure).

For some 40 years, official publications in China have called the Great Famine of 1959-1962 “the three years of natural disasters.” But no one seems to know exactly what these disasters were: Floods? Drought? Earthquakes? Landslides? Hail storms or locust plagues? No one has the answer, and no one is brave enough to stand up and demand an answer from the government — because the official pronouncement of “natural disaster” is sufficiently intimidating to close all mouths.

Motivated by the desire to be “responsible to history and the truth,” a phrase churned out ad nauseam in China’s mass media, official accounts over the last 10 years have become more circumspect, employing the more neutral term “the three years of difficulties,” which seems to cover both the natural and manmade. This approach obviates the need to examine contributing factors and that Mao and other leaders caused the famine.

[…] The memories of those who experienced the famine are fading away. The current generation, like their parents, were force-fed state CCTV newscasts and party mouthpiece People’s Daily reports, but also fattened to the point of obesity with Coca-Cola and hamburgers. Of course they now find it difficult to imagine that people once starved to death. And so they ask: If they didn’t have rice, why didn’t they eat meat?

While stories of the disaster may seem far-fetched to the young, older generations’ memories of the famine might actually be fuelling China’s ballooning childhood obesity problem. From Debra Bruno at The Washington Post:

Although the era of famine is long past, many grandparents and parents still push their children to eat a lot.

Setsuko Hosoda, a family doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital, says the parents and grandparents she sees are “always worried that their child is not eating enough.” A 2012 Penn State study of 176 Chinese children ages 6 to 18 found that 72 percent of mothers of overweight children thought their children were normal or underweight.

Sissi Zhong, a 26-year-old Beijing secretary, recalls that her grandparents got angry if she left food on her plate when she was a child. “They said, ‘Do you know, in my time of food shortages, people didn’t have food, so how can you waste your food?’ ” Zhong says. So she cleaned her plate even if she was very full.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, famine, great leap forward, historical record, history, Murong Xuecun, obesity, photography, propaganda posters, Yang Jisheng
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There are cries that China’s is a new imperialism. If so, at least it is new and not trapped in a stagnant history of ex-colonisers and their ex-colonies. Hearteningly, China does not hide its wish to make profit out of its dealings with Africa behind altruism or religion or paternalism. Thus, if indeed we are witnessing a 21st-century attempt to colonise Africa once more, at least there will be no hegemony to destroy when the fight for independence begins. But if China’s dealings in Africa do not point to an attempt to make Beijing a metropolis, then it is better not to recast the Chinese arrival in Lagos as the second act of the British landing in Eko; it is better that history serves as merely a loose reference for dealing with foreign powers.

Or perhaps the best way to proceed is to work in tandem with the past and the future. In Nigeria, where the power industry is being privatised, the Chinese Nigeria Power Consortium has won the bid for the Sapele power plant. It consists of Nigerian, Chinese and UK companies and thus maybe we can hope that all cultural and historical sensibilities will be preserved, while constant electricity is generated.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africa, Africa investment, colonialism, history
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AT 10.40pm on March 20th 1913 a young man who represented one possible future for China stood on the platform at Shanghai railway station, waiting with friends to board a train to Beijing. Song Jiaoren—30 years old, sporting a Western suit and a wisp of a moustache—had just brilliantly led his new political party, the Nationalists, to overwhelming success in parliamentary elections, the country’s first attempt at democracy after two millennia of imperial rule. He was in line to become China’s first democratically elected prime minister, and to help draft a new constitution for the Republic of China.

[…] But an assassin’s bullet prevented him from trying. Armed with a Browning revolver, an unemployed ex-soldier in black military garb fired a single slug into his back and fled. Song was taken to a nearby hospital, where a bullet was removed from his abdomen. He knew death was near, and in the last political act of his life he dictated a telegram to his chief adversary, President Yuan Shikai […]: “I die with deep regret. I humbly hope that your Excellency will champion honesty, propagate justice, and promote democracy…”

Song died on March 22nd. China’s best chance of democracy may have died with him.

[…] But what if Song had lived? How close did China come to forging a democracy 100 years ago? Was Song’s dream of a liberal revolution doomed? How far did an assassin’s bullet change China’s destiny—just as the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo soon afterwards changed Europe’s?

See more from The Economist’s special double issue at Economist.com.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: assassination, democracy, history, Nationalist Party, Nationalists, Republic of China, revolution, The Economist
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Your must diligently cultivate relationships with these men of privilege. Both you and your friends should work to convince them that you have always been a traditionalist. Never let them think you are a populist.

[…] Do not overlook your family and those closely connected with you. Make sure they all are behind you and want you to succeed. This includes your tribe, your neighbours, your clients, your former slaves, and even your servants. For almost every destructive rumor that makes its way to the public begins among family and friends.

[…] Finally, as regards the Roman masses, be sure to put on a good show. Dignified yes, but full of color and spectacle that appeals so much to crowds. It also wouldn’t hurt to remind them of what scoundrels your opponents are and to smear these men at every opportunity with the crimes, sexual scandals, and corruption they have brought on themselves.

Though denunciations of scoundrelly rivals and colourful if only occasionally dignified spectacles were pillars of the U.S. election campaign that concluded this week, Barmé argues that Cicero’s instructions are still more applicable to Chinese politics than to Western democracies.

At The Diplomat, meanwhile, defence analyst James R. Holmes writes that Roman history might offer China valuable lessons for its handling of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute with Japan:

Enter Quintus Fabius. During Rome’s second war against the North African city-state of Carthage, general and dictator Fabius mastered the art of stalling for time against the vaunted Carthaginian army commanded by Hannibal. Time was on Rome’s side; the balance of forces was not. Fabius, writes historian Polybius, grasped his army’s “manifest inferiority.” He thus “made up his mind to incur no danger and not to risk a battle” against battle-hardened foemen. He simply lurked nearby, posing a threat while refusing combat. […]

Such an approach made sense for Fabius, the commander of an inferior force. It muted risk while promising eventual victory. But Fabian strategies are available to the strong as well as the weak. The stronger yet patient contender can cling to the weaker one. Such an approach compels the weaker contender to either back down or expend resources it can ill spare. Delay suits Beijing’s purposes, letting it present Tokyo a no-win choice. Time is on its side. It holds the advantage of numbers—an advantage that will only grow. Ultimately it can avail itself of the military option without undue risk, should it see the need for a definite end to the controversy. Simply having that option will transform the dynamics across the East China Sea.

[…] Gathering storm clouds followed by a sudden cloudburst—that’s a metaphor for the Fabian way of war. But again, a guileful strategy of delay depends on Fabian virtues that are in short supply in China these days. Beijing appears as anxious to humiliate Tokyo as it is to wrest away the contested real estate. If so, impatience may prod it toward rash, decidedly non-Fabian actions.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, Bo Xilai, diaoyu islands, Geremie R. Barmé, history, military strategy, political system
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