Potted History

Here’s a potted history of Tibet, written for the New York Times by Elliot Sperling, the director of the Tibetan Studies program at Indiana University:

Don’t Know Much About Tibetan History

FOR many Tibetans, the case for the historical independence of their land is unequivocal. They assert that Tibet has always been and by rights now ought to be an independent country. China’s assertions are equally unequivocal: Tibet became a part of China during Mongol rule and its status as a part of China has never changed. Both of these assertions are at odds with Tibet’s history.

The Tibetan view holds that Tibet was never subject to foreign rule after it emerged in the mid-seventh century as a dynamic power holding sway over an Inner Asian empire. These Tibetans say the appearance of subjugation to the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries, and to the Manchu rulers of China’s Qing Dynasty from the 18th century until the 20th century, is due to a modern, largely Western misunderstanding of the personal relations among the Yuan and Qing emperors and the pre-eminent lamas of Tibet. In this view, the lamas simply served as spiritual mentors to the emperors, with no compromise of Tibet’s independent status.

In China’s view, the Western misunderstandings are about the nature of China: Western critics don’t understand that China has a history of thousands of years as a unified multinational state; all of its nationalities are Chinese. The Mongols, who entered China as conquerers, are claimed as Chinese, and their subjugation of Tibet is claimed as a Chinese subjugation.

Here are the facts. The claim that Tibet entertained only personal relations with China at the leadership level is easily rebutted. Administrative records and dynastic histories outline the governing structures of Mongol and Manchu rule. These make it clear that Tibet was subject to rules, laws and decisions made by the Yuan and Qing rulers. Tibet was not independent during these two periods. One of the Tibetan cabinet ministers summoned to Beijing at the end of the 18th century describes himself unambiguously in his memoirs as a subject of the Manchu emperor.

But although Tibet did submit to the Mongol and Manchu Empires, neither attached Tibet to China. The same documentary record that shows Tibetan subjugation to the Mongols and Manchus also shows that China’s intervening Ming Dynasty (which ruled from 1368 to 1644) had no control over Tibet. This is problematic, given China’s insistence that Chinese sovereignty was exercised in an unbroken line from the 13th century onward.

The idea that Tibet became part of China in the 13th century is a very recent construction. In the early part of the 20th century, Chinese writers generally dated the annexation of Tibet to the 18th century. They described Tibet’s status under the Qing with a term that designates a “feudal dependency,” not an integral part of a country. And that’s because Tibet was ruled as such, within the empires of the Mongols and the Manchus. When the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, Tibet became independent once more.

From 1912 until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, no Chinese government exercised control over what is today China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. The Dalai Lama’s government alone ruled the land until 1951.

Marxist China adopted the linguistic sleight of hand that asserts it has always been a unitary multinational country, not the hub of empires. There is now firm insistence that “Han,” actually one of several ethnonyms for “Chinese,” refers to only one of the Chinese nationalities. This was a conscious decision of those who constructed 20th-century Chinese identity. (It stands in contrast to the Russian decision to use a political term, “Soviet,” for the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.)

There is something less to the arguments of both sides, but the argument on the Chinese side is weaker. Tibet was not “Chinese” until Mao Zedong’s armies marched in and made it so.

Elliot Sperling is the director of the Tibetan Studies program at Indiana University’s department of Central Eurasia Studies.

Paper tigers

In 1956, Mao Zedong said of the United States: “In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of; it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.” European languages, including English, quickly adopted the term to refer to something that seems as threatening as a tiger, but is really harmless. In the nineteenth century, General Li Hongzhang (1823-1901) had used the term in much the same way as Mao; before that it had already appeared in the 16th-century novel The Water Margin (水滸傳), as I’ve just learned from the Chinese Wikipedia entry. Recently, however, the term “paper tiger” has been undergoing a semantic shift in China as a result of phony claims that the South China tiger has been sighted. The Asia Times reports:

 

SUN WUKONG

‘Paper tiger’ tales shred credibility

By Wu Zhong, China Editor

 

HONG KONG – The South China tiger, Panthera tigris amoyensis, has not been seen in the wild since 1980. But recently the extremely endangered, if not already extinct, species has drawn wide attention from the public and media in China.

 

The attention comes not because the big cat has been seen, but because of repeated scandals which have arisen from efforts to “prove” the tigers’ existence in the wild with forged photographs or video tapes.

 

The first of such scandals came in October, 2007, when Zhou Zhenglong, a farmer and amateur photographer in Zhengping county in the northwestern Chinese province of Shaanxi, claimed he had risked his life to shoot 30-plus digital photographs of a South China tiger in the wild. (A tiger grabs China by the tail by Kent Ewing, Asia Times Online, December 8, 2007)

 

Senior officials with the Shaanxi Provincial Forestry Bureau immediately threw their weight behind the authenticity of Zhou’s snapshots. They rushed to hold a press conference to announce the “re-discovery” of the big cat under their jurisdiction.

 

However, the photographs were soon questioned. Netizens doubted the pictures and claimed they were fake. Even the tiger in the pictures was suspected of having been copycatted from cardboard paintings. The furor became so intense that the term “paper tiger” – originally from chairman Mao Zedong’s well-known quotation that US imperialists and all reactionaries are nothing but paper tigers – has been given a new meaning: forgery.

 

Urged by the public and wildlife experts, the national Forestry Ministry formed an investigation team on October 24, but their report has remained unpublicized.

 

But in early February, the Shaanxi provincial government reprimanded the forestry bureau for violating official regulations by holding the press conference to support Zhou’s “discovery” without further evidence.

 

On February 4, the Shaanxi Forestry Bureau issued a public letter saying sorry for publicizing the photos, though it refrained from commenting about their authenticity. “We didn’t have a spot investigation before we held the press conference,” the letter said. “We curtly released the discovery of the South China tiger without substantial proof, which reflects our blundering manner and lax discipline.”

 

Once the farce of the “paper tiger” in Shaanxi subsided another scandal involving a fake South China tiger was exposed. And this time, the one who did the forgery was a journalist.

 

On March 19, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that Wu Hua, a reporter with the Pingjiang county TV station in Hunan province, had announced that he had “unintentionally videotaped” a suspected South China tiger in Shiniuzai in Pingjiang.

 

Some local officials immediately jumped to support the claims. The next day, led by Wu, some officials from Hunan provincial and Yueyang municipal forestry authorities paid an inspection tour to the site where the tiger was allegedly videotaped. They concluded that “what Wu Hua has snapped is factual”. Pingjiang county is under the jurisdiction of Yueyang municipality.

 

But just four days later, on March 24, the provincial forestry bureau, after a further investigation, announced that the big cat Wu filmed was in fact a Siberian tiger “borrowed” from a circus from Anhui province, which happened to be on a performance tour in Hunan.

 

Wu was subsequently blamed for making the forgery to enhance his own fame.

 

It’s true that anyone who proves the existence of a South China tiger in the wild will become famous overnight. And the fame could also bring fortune to the rediscoverer. Had Zhou’s photos or Wu’s videos proved true, they would have had much potential commercial value. Clearly, it was fame and money that lured than into making the risky forgeries.

 

It was for the same reasons, it could be said, that local officials immediately threw their weight behind the forgeries.

 

Since the South China Tiger is such a popular and endangered species, if one is proven to exist in a specific place, the place will no doubt immediately be declared a national protected area with special funds allocated by the state annually. Normally, places inhabited by wild animals are poor, remote mountainous areas, and special funds could mean a lot for the local economies. After all, protection of the giant panda has boosted many relevant local economies.

 

What seems puzzling, however, is how such scandals could ever come one after another in such a short period. A possible explanation may be that the lack of punishment on those involved in the forgery in Shaanxi’s case virtually encouraged Wu to take his chance.

 

In Shaanxi’s case, because Zhou Zhenglong is a farmer and not subject to any administrative discipline, authorities may not be able to do anything to him for the counterfeit; it could hardly be considered a criminal offense. Without the underwriting of Shaanxi forestry officials, Zhou’s picture would have been left to debate. So, at least these officials should have been held accountable.

 

Since Wu is a journalist, what he has done violates the moral code of journalism and he must be dealt with seriously. If he is left unpunished, it would deliver the message that authorities tolerate fake news stories. Authorities must also launch a through investigation into whether local officials were involved in Wu’s forgery.

 

According to Yueyang media, the local government has invested tens of millions of yuan in recent years to turn Shiniuzai into a scenic site, in hope of attracting tourists. However, the business operation has not been so good and the local authorities have even asked the Anhui circus for a performance tour to boost local tourism. Logically, Shiniuzai would have benefited a lot from Wu’s forged discovery had it not been exposed.

 

With the repeated fake news, the South China tiger has already become the proverbial wolf in the children’s story The Boy Who Cried Wolf. And if Wu and those local officials who are proved to be involved get away easily, it is likely that more wolf cries involving South China tigers or some other endangered animal will be exposed soon.

Kunming-Bangkok

When I lived in Kunming some twenty-odd years ago, traveling in Yunnan was an adventure. The New York Times reports how the new Kungming-Bangkok freeway is changing people’s lives in Yunnan and across the border:

March 31, 2008
In Isolated Hills of Asia, New Roads to Speed Trade
By THOMAS FULLER

LUANG NAMTHA, Laos — The newly refurbished Route 3 that cuts through this remote town is an ordinary strip of pavement, the type of two-lane road you might find winding through the backwoods of Vermont or sunflower fields in the French provinces.

But On Leusa, 70, who lives near the road, calls it “deluxe.”

As a young woman she traded opium and tiger bones along the road, then nothing more than a horse trail.

On Monday, the prime ministers of Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam will officially inaugurate the former opium smuggling route as the final link of what they call the “north-south economic corridor,” a 1,150-mile network of roads linking the southern Chinese city of Kunming to Bangkok.

The network, several sections of which were still unpaved as late as December, is a major milestone for China and its southern neighbors. The low-lying mountains here, the foothills of the Himalayas, served for centuries as a natural defensive boundary between Southeast Asian civilizations and the giant empire to the north. The road rarely follows a straight line as it meanders through terraced rice fields and tea plantations.

Today, those same Southeast Asian civilizations alternately crave closer integration with that empire and fear its sway as an emerging economic giant. China, in turn, covets the land, markets and natural resources of one of Asia’s least developed and most pristine regions.

With trade across these borders increasing by double digits every year, China has helped construct a series of roads inside the territory of its southern neighbors. The Chinese government is paying half the cost of a bridge over the Mekong River between Laos and Thailand, due for completion in 2011.

It financed parts of Route 3 in Laos and refurbished roads in northern Myanmar, including the storied Burma Road used by the Allies in World War II to supply troops fighting the Japanese. China is also building an oil and gas pipeline from the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar to Kunming.

Taken together, these roads are breaking the isolation of the thinly inhabited upper reaches of Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, areas that in recent decades languished because of wars, ethnic rivalries and heroin trafficking. The roads run through the heart of the Golden Triangle, the region that once produced 70 percent of the world’s opium crop.

The new roads, as well as upgraded ports along the Mekong River, are changing the diets and spending habits of people on both sides of the border. China is selling fruit and green vegetables that favor temperate climates to its southern neighbors, and is buying tropical fruit, rubber, sugar cane, palm oil and seafood.

“You never used to see apples in the traditional markets,” said Ruth Banomyong, an expert in logistics who teaches at Thammasat University in Bangkok.

China has blasted shallow sections of the Mekong to make it more easily navigable for cargo barges, allowing traders to ship apples, pears and lettuce downriver. The price of apples in Thailand has fallen to the equivalent of about 20 cents apiece from more than a dollar a decade ago. Roses and other cut flowers from China have displaced flowers flown in from the Netherlands, making Valentine’s Day easier on the wallet for Thais. Traders now have the choice of shipping by barge, truck or both.

Overall, even before the completion of the road, trade between China and the upland Southeast Asian countries Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam had risen impressively, to $53 billion in 2007 from just over $1 billion a decade ago.

People are on the move as well. Wang Suqin, the director of express services at the Kunming bus terminal, says Chinese tourists are eager to travel overland to Thailand.

“Every day we receive calls about this,” Ms. Wang said.

Bus service to Bangkok, which has not yet started, will take at least 24 hours, but that is not a deterrent, Ms. Wang says; it is part of the fun. “We don’t want to miss the scenery along the way,” she said.

During a weeklong journey through the cities and villages along the route from Kunming to Bangkok, rice farmers, tea pickers, businessmen, traders and government officials expressed satisfaction and some excitement that a project decades in the making was nearly completed.

Chen Jinqiang, a Chinese government official from Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province, said the road would help ensure that farmers get their vegetables and flowers to market, avoiding a problem he witnessed in the 1980s, when poor transportation left watermelons rotting in the fields. “Even the pigs refused to eat them,” he said.

But the road also excites old fears of the monolith to the north. Preecha Kamolbutr, the governor of Chiang Rai Province, in northern Thailand, said it might exacerbate what he calls a “Chinese invasion.” He is particularly concerned for Laos, he said, an impoverished country the size of Britain but with a population of just 6.5 million.

“Chinese businessmen come in with their own capital, their own workers and their own construction materials,” the governor said. “I fear that in the future the Lao people might feel that they’ve been exploited. They will feel they’ve been invaded.”

For now, those fears do not appear to be shared by many Laotians. Residents of the sparsely populated Luang Namtha Province said they welcomed visitors and were counting on an influx of Chinese, Thais and others to help raise their incomes.

Alinda Phengsawat, the head of tourism planning in the province, said the road would bring visitors to what has been a very remote part of the country.

“Maybe they will stay overnight,” she said. “That would be better than just driving through.”

Since paving was completed late last year, people who live deep in the jungle have come to the edge of Route 3 to sell vegetables and forest products, residents say.

“You have a huge hinterland that’s pretty badly served at the moment, from Kunming down through Laos and northern Thailand,” said John Cooney, director of the Southeast Asia infrastructure division at the Asian Development Bank, which financed one section of the road in Laos. “That suddenly is becoming a market.”

Cash-strapped Laos is encouraging Chinese investment by handing out what it has plenty of: land. Deputy Prime Minister Somsavat Lengsavad has said the government will trade “land for capital.”

The government recently gave a Chinese company a 50-year renewable lease for a large swath of prime land outside the capital, Vientiane, in exchange for the building of a sports stadium. Here in Luang Namtha, a Chinese company has been given 30-year rights to build and operate what is being called, perhaps euphemistically, the Bo Ten Economic Development Zone.

The main draw so far is not the factories or warehouses typically associated with these zones but a casino, which is off limits to Laotian gamblers, according to Ms. Alinda.

“I went up there and everyone was speaking Chinese,” said Pansak Gardhan, a Thai engineer who is helping rebuild the small airport in Luang Namtha. “All the signs were in Chinese.”

Chinese coming here to gamble will drive through what is probably the most beautiful section of the Kunming-Bangkok road, a four-lane highway that soars over valleys and clings to hillsides striated with rubber-tree and tea plantations.

Li Hui, an official in the foreign affairs office of Yunnan Province, which borders Laos, says one segment of the journey from Kunming to the border used to take three days. “Half of the people were throwing up,” Mr. Li said. On the new highway the same segment takes only a few hours.

The Chinese spent $4 billion building the highway from Kunming to the border. One particularly difficult stretch of road required the construction of 430 bridges and 15 tunnels. That portion of the road is also monitored by 168 cameras centrally controlled by highway department officials who watch for elephants — there are an estimated 275 in the area — and other stray animals. The cameras also assist the police in catching suspected criminals.

“We’ve helped solve 130 cases of drug smuggling, robberies and murder,” boasted Zhang Zhulin, director of the Chinese segment of the expressway, which opened in April 2006.

In a large room with a “Keep Out!” sign posted at the entrance, Mr. Zhang toggled a joystick to show how he could scan different segments of the road as well as zoom in on the faces of passengers as cars passed through toll booths.

The Kunming-Bangkok road is not a seamless experience. There are sections on the Chinese side that have yet to be upgraded. With the bridge over the Mekong still in planning stages, passengers must take ferries across the Thailand-Laos border. And formalities at border checkpoints, especially for freight, can sometimes take hours.

But the road is an obvious improvement from the one Ms. On knew as a child. Her son drives her around in his Toyota pickup truck, but she is not interested in going very far. “I get carsick,” she said.

A monster with a human face

The Chinese government continues to resort Cultural Revolution language to attack the Dalai Lama. “The Dalai Lama is a jackal wrapped in a habit, a monster with human face and animal’s heart.” The Economist comments “For pity’s sake.” But the Economist insists that a boycott of the Olympics is wrongheaded. Merkel and Sarkozy have said that they won’t attend the opening ceremony. Bush and Brown are still planning to go.

A devil with a human face

Zhang Qingli, the new Party Secretary for the Tibet Autonomous Region, said a few days ago that “the Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans.” Now he’s been quoted by the Tibet Daily as saying that “The Dalai is a wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast.” You have to ask yourself why, in the run-up to the Olympics, the Chinese authorities would use such incendiary language, to say nothing of the more than one hundred Tibetans they’ve killed recently.

“The real Buddha for Tibetans”

Zhang Qingli, the new Party Secretary for the Tibet Autonomous Region, says that “the Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans.” The Real Buddha has killed 100 and arrested more than 1000 Tibetans in recent days.

Robert Barnet, professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia, offers some perspective on what’s going on in Tibet in an article published by the Wall Street Journal:

Tragedy in Tibet
By ROBERT BARNETT
March 17, 2008

The charred bodies and pulped faces of Chinese migrants murdered during Friday’s riots in Lhasa are likely to become a new and terrible image of Tibet. Just as those Tibetans who have died in ethnic violence or at the hands of the security forces, those killed over the weekend in the struggle over Tibet’s future died what should have been unnecessary deaths. The situation would be hugely exacerbated if reports of random shooting by troops are confirmed.

The desperation of Tibetans living on the Tibetan plateau has been documented for several decades by scholars and journalists, as well as in repeated appeals by exiles and their leader, the Dalai Lama. Major grievances include elaborate restrictions on religion, an undisguised encouragement of Chinese migration to Tibetan towns, the ban on criticism of most Communist Party policies, the imposition of ethnic Chinese leaders to run the region, the forced settlement of 100,000 nomads without prospect of future livelihood, and the obligatory moving of 250,000 farmers in 2006 from their villages to new houses along major roads, often largely at their own expense. Underpinning all of this is the deeper issue of Tibetans’ continuing recollection of themselves as a separate nation that has been forcibly annexed.

China has shown some flexibility and good intentions. In 2002 Beijing began, with impressive initiative, a dialogue process with the Dalai Lama after 20 years of little contact. The following year, President Hu Jintao called for development policies based on ultra-rapid GDP growth to be replaced by a focus on developing human resources. He began to refer to the positive role of religion in a “harmonious society,” especially in reference to Buddhism.

But these important policy signals were not applied in Tibetan areas. Little effort was made to justify these renewed restrictions, some of which did not apply to ethnic Chinese in Tibet or exist in inland China. The Dalai Lama’s call in 2005 on exiles to stop protesting against Chinese leaders was not matched by confidence building measures from Beijing. By 2006, the talks with exiles had slowed down to the point of virtual nonexistence, waiting for any sign of commitment from the Chinese side.

In Lhasa, there was nothing subtle about the hardening of policy. President Hu appointed Zhang Qingli as the new Party Secretary for the Tibet Autonomous Region. Mr. Zhang spearheaded an intensification of the anti-Dalai Lama campaign first imposed on Tibetans 10 years earlier. He will be remembered for such choice remarks as “the Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans” (though he did at least deny that he was himself a Buddha). He stepped up the semi-secret ban on any form of religious practice for students and for government employees, a ban that is illegal under Chinese law. And he pushed through the construction of the first railway line in Tibet without introducing policies to address Tibetans’ fears — since proved correct — that it would accelerate Chinese migration to the region.

Today, Tibetans exist in a shadow world, where criticism of Chinese policies can rarely be spoken for fear of political and professional suicide, or worse. No one who has lived in Tibet and speaks Tibetan will have been unaware that Tibetans were hiding deep and unexpressed discontent and fear. Random people would approach me in Lhasa alleyways, sometimes weeping, whispering and begging me to tell the world that the Chinese were denying them freedom, or some such phrase. The only surprise is that after 20 years they dared to take to the streets in such numbers.

All sides have made mistakes. The West has depicted Tibetans as likeable victims, rather than as agents with coherent political agendas that needed urgent answers. The Dalai Lama has been accused by the Chinese of sending mixed signals about his promise to give up independence. The Chinese side has failed to listen to the warnings of their own advisers, let alone those opinions offered by Tibetans and outsiders.

It is Beijing that chose in 1950 to become the power holder in Tibet, and it is Beijing that now has to face the most questions. When the riots broke out on Friday morning, why did leaders fail for several hours to send in riot squads to hold the city center, thus allowing the protestors to turn on Chinese migrants rather than their earlier target, the police? Why were no concessions made to keep the dialogue process alive? Why was migration not restricted before the railway was opened? Why were Tibet officials not stopped from illegal bans on religion?

As China’s response to the protests already shows signs of resembling a witch hunt rather than an investigation — with little distinction between the thousands of legitimate protestors and the few murderous rioters — the larger question remains: Who was responsible in Beijing for refusing to listen to Tibetans’ deeply held complaints? Were China’s leaders really unaware of what every tourist knew to be the deep unhappiness and repression of the populace?

Serious answers to these questions will require a bitter swallowing of pride by China’s leaders and the admission of terrible failures. There is some ground for hope: only last year, Phuntsog Wanggyal, a former Tibetan official now based in Beijing, called openly on President Hu to negotiate with the Dalai Lama. And only hours after the riot, an army general in Beijing declared his troops would take no part in the reclaiming of Lhasa.

If China’s leaders can rein in the impulse for excessive retribution and listen to the urgent needs expressed, however viciously, by protestors and rioters across Tibet, perhaps those tragic deaths will not have been totally in vain.

Mr. Barnett is Director of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University in New York, an Adjunct Professor and Associate Research Scholar. His most recent book is “Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field of Social and Cultural Change,” edited with Ronald Schwartz (Brill, 2008).

Undeciphered writing system

Indecipherable Ancient Books Found in Chongqing

The Epoch Times

Feb 24, 2008

Mysterious ancient books found in Chongqing. For the past two years no one has been able to read them. (Epoch Times screen shot taken from 21 cn.com)

The Tujia have been known as an ethnic minority with its own spoken language but without a written language. Yet a succession of ancient books in the same written language have been found in the Youyang Tujia habitation straddling the borders of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou Province, and Chongqing City. For the past two years none have been able to read the ancient books.Chongqing Morning Post published a report on February 15 about the story of Zhou Yongle, 38, a resident in Youyang Tujia and Miao Autonomous County. In the winter of 2006, Zhou arrived at Yiju Town to purchase antiques. He bought a pile of old books from a farmer and took them home. When he was tidying up the purchased books, an ancient book bound with thread drew his attention.

This special ancient book was made up of over twenty pieces of parchment that was commonly used in the Wuling Mountain Area. Characters vertically arranged on the parchment bear a striking resemblance to traditional Chinese characters. Written with brushes, the handwriting is neat and strong. Much to his amazement, he could not recognize any of the words. He was left dumbfounded.

With detailed observation, Zhou Yongle found Chinese characters next to each word that he had previously not noticed. The smaller Chinese characters seemed to serve as footnotes or translation. According to the translation done by the Chinese characters, the book should be titled Ancient Three Character Classic .

Zhou Yongle consulted such Chinese classics as the Shuowen Jiezi [1], Bronzeware script [2], and the Kangxi Dictionary [3]. With an eagerness to figure out the meaning of each character and the name of the writing system, he consulted cultural experts from the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission of Youyang County, and also local seniors, but to no avail. None were able to read the strange characters.

That’s not the end of story. In the spring and summer of 2007, residents in the ancient town of Gongtan were all evacuated due to construction on the Wujiang Hydropower Station. Zhou went to an old house to again purchase antiques. Suddenly, a coverless old book caught his eye: characters on this book were exactly identical to those on his first discovered book.

After buying the book, Zhou thoroughly examined it and found that it was an ancient book used as a dictionary, with pages combined with thread and characters vertically arranged. Written with brushes, it was composed of big characters similar to those of his previous ancient book. Smaller Chinese characters beneath the content words served as footnotes. Comparison of the two books revealed that characters of the two books belonged to the same writing system, along with footnotes presented in Chinese characters. Based on the resemblance, Zhou concluded that the two books were written in the same language.

Zhou commented, “The Tujia are widely recognized as an ethnic minority with its own spoken language, but without its written language. If we could unravel the mystery of these undecipherable books discovered along the Wu River, and if we could prove they are words used by the Tujia, that would be a great discovery for the Tujia culture. Then the history of ethnic minorities would be revised.”

So far, this kind of mysterious writing system, said Zhou, has been found only in Youyang County. Traces have never been spotted in any other areas.

[1] The Shuowen Jiezi was an early 2nd century CE Chinese dictionary from the Han Dynasty. It was the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary.

[2] Bronzeware script is a family of scripts found on Chinese bronze such as zhong (bells) and ding (tripods)

[3] The Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty ordered its compilation in 1710 and it was published in 1716. The dictionary is named after the Emperor’s era name.

Change from within (and the top)?

The Central Party School has recently published a paper calling for political liberalization. How significant this is remains to be seen. 

“China think-tank issues political reform blueprint”

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

By Chris Buckley, Reuters

BEIJING — China risks dangerous instability unless it embraces democratic reforms to limit the power of the ruling Communist Party, foster competitive voting and rein in censors, the Party’s top think-tank has warned in a new report.

 

The “comprehensive political system reform plan” by scholars at the Central Party School in Beijing argues for steady liberalization that its authors say can build a “modern civil society” by 2020 and “mature democracy and rule of law” in later decades.

 

The cost of delaying this course could be economic disarray and worsening corruption and public discontent, they write in “Storming the Fortress: A Research Report on China’s Political System Reform after the 17th Party Congress.”

 

“Citizens’ steadily rising democratic consciousness and the grave corruption among Party and government officials make it increasing urgent to press ahead with demands for political system reform,” the report states. “The backwardness of the political system is affecting economic development.”

 

The report was finished in October, just after the Party’s twice-a-decade congress ended and gave President Hu Jintao five more years as party chief. But it is only now appearing in some Beijing bookstores.

 

This is no manifesto for outright democracy. The authors say the Party must keep overall control and “elite” decision-making will help China achieve lasting economic prosperity by pushing past obstacles to economic reform.

 

But the 366-page report give a strikingly detailed blueprint of how some elite advisers see political relaxation unfolding, with three phases of reform in the next 12 years, including restricting the Party’s powers and expanding the rights of citizens, reporters, religious believers and lawmakers.

 

“Until now political reform has been scattered and inconsequential,” Wang Guixiu, a professor at the Party School not involved in the study, told Reuters. “Real political reform needs a substantive plan of action, and there are some scholars and officials who believe that’s what is needed

now.”

 

The authors include Zhou Tianyong and Wang Changjiang, senior reform-minded scholars at the School, which trains officials for higher office. The report also has a preface by Li Junru, a government adviser and vice president of the Party School.

 

Several authors contacted for comment declined to comment.

 

The authors argue that government regulation of news is needed as China navigates unsettling social changes. But the present system of secretive and often arbitrary censorship is stoking corruption and public distrust of government, they said.

 

“Freedom of the press is an inevitable trend,” they said, calling for a law to protect reporters and “effectively halt unconstitutional and unlawful interference in media activities”.

 

They also urge greater official respect for religion — a sensitive topic in China, where the atheist Party is wary of growing numbers of Christians, and unrest in Buddhist Tibet and the largely Muslim region of Xinjiang in the country’s far west.

 

“Political faith and religious faith are not in contradiction,” the scholars said.

 

They propose that China’s nearly 3,000-delegate national parliament be slimmed down and given direct powers to set the budget and audit government spending.

 

Candidates for legislatures should be allowed to actively compete for votes, which is now banned, the authors said. And the Communist Party itself must bind itself under rule of law.

 

Communist Party chief Hu has promoted limited “inner-Party democracy” to expose officials to more checks, but has shown no appetite for broad political liberalization.

 

In a speech on Monday, Hu said the Party had to be a “staunch leadership core” that maintained “flesh-and-blood bonds” with the people, Xinhua news agency reported.

 

But the Party School report, with its detailed arguments for change, and other books and essays from reformist advisers in the past year, suggest that some senior advisers have been thinking closely about much more ambitious reforms.

 

A recent survey of mid-ranking officials studying at the Party School indicated that growing numbers believe deeper political reform is needed.

 

In the survey of 154 officials conducted in late 2007, 55.5 percent nominated the “political system” as one of three areas of reform that most “concerned” them, according to a study recently published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

 

In late 2005, 40 percent of officials surveyed listed political reform as one of the areas.

 

A Revisionist History of Footbinding

From Far Outliers:

The Fall 2006 issue of China Review International (on Project Muse) contains a review of what looks to be a fascinating and comprehensive reanalysis of footbinding in China: Dorothy Ko’s Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (U. California Press, 2005). Here are some excerpts of the review (not the book itself).

Dorothy Ko’s new history of footbinding is a wonderfully imaginative, wide-ranging, and provocative study of a subject long in need of revisionism….

Both foreign missionaries and Chinese nationalists developed the antifootbinding strategy of photographing and exposing the misshapen foot whose appeal had long depended on the allure of its concealment in the inner quarters and its covering with the elegant embroidered cloth shoe. One of Ko’s most striking conclusions is that, with the exception of a few women (such as the radical Qiu Jin, beheaded by the Qing police in 1908), the Chinese abolitionists were primarily male, and their main arguments concerned not the pain of women but rather the weakness of the Chinese nation and the humiliation and embarrassment caused the nation by such a backward custom. She criticizes the antifootbinding movement as misogynist toward women with bound feet, indifferent to the pain caused by unbinding, and less successful than many have claimed. “One woman’s pride and freedom was predicated on another woman’s shame and bondage” (p. 68). Although not mentioned in her bibliography, an excellent complement to Ko’s analysis that in my view corroborates many of her insights on the complexities and ironies of the turn-of-the-century antifootbinding movement is the inventive novel by Feng Jicai, Sancun jinlian (Three-inch Golden Lotus), published in Chinese in 1986 and in a fine English translation in 1994 (trans. by David Wakefield, University of Hawai‘i Press). Set in Tianjin, Feng’s novel brilliantly reveals the power of social and political fads and fashions in a society as old, as competitive, and as fluid as China’s….

Whereas Ko believes we can never know the origins of such a complex custom with any certainty, she surveys a variety of origin discourses. The Song scholar Zhang Bangji (fl. twelfth century CE) argued that the custom began in his own time. The great Ming literatus Yang Shen (1488–1559) traced the custom back as early as the Six Dynasties (222–589). His foremost critic, Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), argued that footbinding began to spread along with the development of printing in the tenth century CE, insightfully seeing both developments as cultural institutions and material practices. Zhao Yi (1727–1814), the great bibliophile and historian, noted the prevalence of the custom throughout the empire, and he echoed Hu Yinglin in tracing footbinding’s origins to the tenth century. One of Zhao’s most striking insights was to tie the origins of footbinding with the development of household furniture; as women began to sit in chairs rather than on the floor, footbinding became ergonomically possible, and sitting in a chair with her feet dangling down provided a woman the opportunity to display her feet discreetly….

This chapter is one of Ko’s strongest and most original. It is particularly striking that none of her historians on footbinding cite the need to prevent the mobility of women as a justification for the custom, and none cite Confucianism as having any connection with it….

Patricia Ebrey argued years ago that the binding of women’s feet in Song times had less to do with the rise of neo-Confucianism and more to do with popular culture, economic developments, marriage customs, and even China’s relations with its nomadic neighbors. Ebrey pointed out that Chinese masculinity was redefined in the Song to be more refined and aesthetically sensitive, and less active, martial, and athletic than in earlier times. Such a redefinition of masculinity might well have required the parallel development of a new view of femininity that was softer, more delicate, and more effete than before. Footbinding was a way to construct femininity in this softer, weaker, more compliant vein. Ebrey also noted the Chinese reaction against the nomadic cultures on the northern and western borders as another possible factor in promoting the spread of footbinding that came to be seen as a marker of China’s unique civilization in contrast to its nomadic neighbors.

A case of yuanfen (缘分)

A remarkable case of yuanfen (缘分 ) was reported earlier this week by the Hong Kong and Taiwanese press. Yuanfen is the fate that brings people back together, a meant-to-be relationship. It is a happy moment in time when countless strands that came apart converge again. Yuanfen is also the fate that brings people together for the first time, a predestined relationship. The Chinese say, “It takes hundreds of reincarnations to bring two people to ride on the same boat, and a thousand years to bring two people to share the same pillow” (百世修来共船渡,千世修来共枕眠). Yuanfen also dictates encounters among friends and lovers. John Minford, a translator of Chinese literature, once explained that it is the “occult and inscrutable chain of causes or attractions that operate to bring together those who have an affinity for each other.” When you’re walking down a street in a strange city inhabited by millions of strangers and you come to an intersection and turn left instead of right, following your heart, and you bump into an old friend you haven’t seen in years, that’s yuanfen.

Here’s the story, as reported by the Hong Kong Herald: 

A Vietnamese woman who came to Taiwan to work as a maid and to search for her Taiwanese father has been reunited with him in a human drama story bordering on a miracle.

All of Taiwan’s newspapers on Tuesday reported how Tran Thi Kham, 40, was recently reunited with her father Tsai Han-chao, 77, who could hardly believe what had happened: ‘I can only say: This is fate.’

The story goes back to 1967 when Tsai, then a 36-year-old businessman, took a business trip to Hong Kong and fell in love with Ah Hua, a Vietnamese girl working as a shop assistant at a Hong Kong department store.

Though already married, Tsai fell in love with Ah Hua and gave her his photo and a gold ring. The affair was short-lived as Tsai returned to Taiwan and Ah Hua returned to North Vietnam to care for her sick mother.

In Vietnam, Ah Hua gave birth to a girl, Tran Thi Kham, but died when Tran was two months old, leaving behind only a photo of Tran Tsai and a gold ring.

Tran was raised by Ah Hua’s elder sister. When Tran got married at 21, the aunt told Tran about her father. In 2004 Tran, leaving behind an abusive husband and two grown children, came to work in Taiwan and to search for her father.

Tran brought with her Tsai’s photo and the gold ring but did not know where to start her search. But as if arranged by fate, her first employer – unknown to her at the time – was her father Tsai, who had applied for a foreign maid to care for his paralysed wife.

Tran cared for Mrs Tsai for seven months until she died, never knowing Tsai was her father and Tsai’s six children were her half-brothers and sisters.

‘I never talked to her about Vietnam or Ah Hua because it was long time ago and I did not know Ah Hua had become pregnant,’ Tsai said, peeking at old photos at his home in Sanchung near Taipei, where he lives alone.

Tsai’s feelings are complicated by his recollection about Tran’s mother Ah Hua, recalling now that he had liked her then, but that the affair had been just a fling.

‘I met her only twice and never contacted her afterwards. Neither did she contact me. How could I know she became pregnant?’ he mused.

After Mrs Tsai had died, Tran moved to work for another employer on Taiwan’s offshore island Kinmen, and then other employers there.

Recently Tran noticed that she had lost her parcel containing Tsai’s photo and the ring. She suspected she had left it at Tsai’s home, so she asked Kinmen police to phone Tsai to check.

‘I checked my wife’s cabinet and saw the parcel and opened it to see what was inside. When I saw my photo and the ring, I nearly fainted,’ Tsai said, in a slow and weak voice.

‘I called back the Kinmen police to tell them it was my photo and ring in the packet. They said it was too complicated and I should go to Kinmen so that I and Tran could talk it over.’

Tsai flew to Kinmen for a tearful reunion early this month.

Neither of them could believe that they had lived under the same roof for seven months, but not knowing they were father and daughter.

A DNA test proved Tran is Tsai’s daughter.

Tran has returned to Vietnam as her work contract expired. Now, she wants to emigrate to Taiwan to care for her father, who is living alone and in poor health.

It was not clear how Tsai’s six children were reacting to the news about their father’s extra-marital affair and their half-sister from Vietnam.

Although Taiwan radio and TV reported Tsai and his daughter’s reunion throughout the day, and their photos were on the front page of every newspaper, Tsai has not received a phone call from any of his six children.

‘I think they will call me when they see the news,’ he said, looking at the telephone on his table.

Blogger Power

The New York Times reports: “More than 100 people are under investigation and several government officials have been detained or removed from office in central China after a dispute in early January in which a group of city officials beat a bystander to death. The government investigation, which was reported by state-run news outlets here, was touched off by bloggers in China who were outraged that a 41-year-old man had been fatally beaten while trying to use his cellphone to photograph a dispute between villagers and city inspectors…”

Parading prisoners

In 1986, I saw a group of bicycle thieves being paraded through the streets of Kunming before their execution. As a picture in China’s Prosecutorial Daily shows, this sort of thing is still happening today. Otto Malmgren noted recently in a post to the ChinaLaw discussion list that as early as December 1951 the Supreme People’s Court declared that such parades were backward and a flagrant violation of the seriousness and “advanced nature” of the “people’s legal system.” The SPC’s opinion is still in effect.

40,000 fingers a year

Lost Fingers and Low Pay, New York Times, January 5, 2008.

“Here in the Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong, for example, factory workers lose or break about 40,000 fingers on the job every year, according to a study published a few ears ago by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences…

The labor law that took effect on Jan. 1 makes it more difficult to dismiss workers and creates a whole new set of laws that experts say will almost certainly increase labor costs. Yet it may become more difficult for human rights groups to investigate abuses. Concerned about the growing array of threats to profitability, as well as embarrassing exposés, factories are heightening security, harassing labor rights groups and calling the police when journalists show up at their gates.

At the center of the problem is a labor system that relies on young migrant workers, who often leave small rural villages for two- or three-year stints at factories, where they hope to earn enough to return home to start families…”

Suing the censors

From a Washington Post article about a man who has sued the Chinese state censors. It’s the second time that a Chinese citizen has gone to ourt over party censorship:

Outraged that his Internet posting about dogs had been banned, Chen Yuhua wrote to the mayor of Beijing. No answer. He wrote to the city council. Still no answer. When all else failed, he consulted a lawyer, studied China’s civil code and marched into court with a lawsuit.

“I was very careful to follow the correct procedure,” Chen said, pointing at the official legal manual on his dining room table.

Chen’s suit, filed Nov. 26, was a bold challenge to the legal authority of the Communist Party to decide what China’s 1.3 billion people can say and read on their computers. It was a rare — perhaps quixotic — gesture in a country where the power of the Public Security Bureau and Propaganda Department to regulate speech is usually considered absolute, enforced with the threat of jail time.

But it was also a sign that, beneath the ever more prosperous surface, some of China’s educated elite may be growing impatient with a one-party authoritarian system in which anonymous bureaucrats decide what movies, plays, novels or social commentaries are safe enough for public consumption.

Taiwan in Comparative Perspective

A new journal about Taiwan:

Taiwan in Comparative Perspective

“The eJournal of the Taiwan Culture Research Programme
 at the London School of Economics”

China Shrinks

The New York Times, December 9, 2007

Editorial Notebook

China Shrinks 

By EDUARDO PORTER

Few people noticed, but China got smaller the other day. According to new estimates, the colossal Chinese economy that has been making marketers salivate and giving others an inferiority complex may be roughly 40 percent smaller than previously thought: worth $6 trillion rather than $10 trillion. That means it lost a chunk roughly the size of Japan’s output.

What happened was a large statistical glitch. When comparing the size of economies, economists mostly avoid using the standard currency exchange rates seen in bank windows. These fluctuate too much, driven by housing woes, trade deficits or presidential popularity. Economists prefer to use what is known as “purchasing power parity” — or P.P.P. — a rate that adjusts for price differences between countries.

Take a 40 yuan serving of noodles at an eatery in Beijing. If the same dish cost $4 at a comparable restaurant in New York, the noodle P.P.P. would be 10 yuan to the dollar. Calculated using a large basket of goods and services, this ratio allows for a more consistent comparison of economies.

The problem is that the World Bank’s measure of China’s rate, everybody’s benchmark, had been based on a 1980s survey of Chinese prices. This year, the World Bank did its own survey to update the measure. While the bank has not published it yet, Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace extrapolated the figure from another set of exchange rates published by the Asian Development Bank.

It turns out that things in China are more expensive. It’s as though we discovered that the real price of the noodles in Beijing was 50 yuan, yielding a P.P.P. of 12.5 yuan to the dollar rather than 10. That means the Chinese are relatively poorer and China’s economy is smaller than everybody thought.

This is not a mere technicality. Suddenly the number of Chinese who live below the World Bank’s poverty line of a dollar a day jumped from about 100 million to 300 million, roughly the size of the United States population. And if you thought China’s energy consumption was dismally inefficient, consider that it still uses the same amount of energy to produce 40 percent less stuff. The reassessment does not just involve China. India is also likely to be downsized. And, by the way, global growth has very likely been slower than we thought.

I don’t think China’s leaders have said anything about the recalibration. But they should be pretty pleased. China has been known to enjoy throwing its weight around, but being big also exacts a cost. If a country is that wealthy, others can demand that it start pulling its weight and play more by the international rules. If China is less wealthy, and less a rival, maybe some members of the United States Congress will not press it so hard to revalue its exchange rate. Using the earlier estimate, China’s economy was due to surpass the $13 trillion American economy in about five years. At $6 trillion, it may look somewhat less scary.

EDUARDO PORTER

A widow watching the door

Here’s another word for which I don’t think there’s an equivalent in English, though the concept is well known in Europe: 望门寡 (wangmengua, literally a “widow watching the door”). A wangmengua is a woman who remains unmarried for the rest of her life after the death of her fiancée. Luo Guanzhong used the word in the 14th century in his vernacular novel the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義).

There’s a wangmengua in this alpine village. She’s in her 80s and everyone calls her Tante Mimi.

Ancients and moderns

One of the pleasures of translating from Chinese is stumbling across words for which there is no equivalent in English (or other European languages). This morning I came across the character 詁 gǔ, which the 現代漢語詞典 (The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, 2002) defines as “to explain archaic or dialectal words in modern language.” As a noun 詁, or nowadays more commonly 訓詁 (xùngǔ), means “explanations of words in ancient books.” Kong Yingda (574-648) defined the term 詁 as follows: “Gu means gu (to explain ancient language and characters). The ancients and moderns had different languages. Explaining how they are connected enables people to understand.” (詁者,古也。古今異言,通之使人知也。)

Sources:
http://tinyurl.com/3yy4rh
http://tinyurl.com/2vvwky

Updike on Ha Jin

In the New Yorker, John Updike writes of Ha Jin:

A critic cannot but be impressed by the courage and intellect of the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. Born in 1956 of parents who were both military doctors, he volunteered for the People's Liberation Army at the age of fourteen and served five and a half years, near the northeast border with Russia. He began to take a keen interest in reading in his late teens, by which time the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) had closed down China's educational institutions and made any books but Mao's "little red book" suspect. In 1977, Heilongjiang University, in Harbin, admitted Ha Jin but assigned him to study English, even though it was his last choice on a list of preferences. After receiving a master's degree in American literature from Shandong University, in 1984, he came to the United States to do graduate work at Brandeis University. His plans to return to China as a teacher or a translator were changed by the Tiananmen Square massacre, in 1989: he decided to stay in America and to try to become a writer in English. A year later, he published his first book of poems, "Between Silences"; during the nineteen-nineties, he published five more volumes in English, including two collections of short stories, one of which, "Ocean of Words" (1996), won the PEN / Hemingway Award and the other, "Under the Red Flag" (1997), received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His busy decade‹in the course of which he was hired, in 1993, by Emory University, in Atlanta, as an instructor in poetry‹was capped by a first novel, "Waiting," which received the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN / Faulkner. His prize-winning command of English has a few precedents, notably Conrad and Nabokov, but neither made the leap out of a language as remote from the Indo-European group, in grammar and vocabulary, in scriptural practice and literary tradition, as Mandarin.

"Waiting" is impeccably written, in a sober prose that does nothing to call attention to itself and yet capably delivers images, characters, sensations, feelings, and even, in a basically oppressive and static situation, bits of comedy and glimpses of natural beauty. The very modesty of the tone strengthens the reader's belief that this is how private lives were conducted amid the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, as ancient customs worked with a fear-ridden Communist bureaucracy to stifle normal human appetites. Every simple, bleak detail has the fascination of the hitherto unknown; not a word of Ha Jin's hard-won English seems out of place or wasted. And the first-person, rather documentary prose of a subsequent prize-winning novel, "War Trash" (2004), flows as smoothly.

His new novel, "A Free Life" (Pantheon; $26), is a relatively lumpy and uncomfortable work, of which a first draft, he confides in a brief afterword, was completed in the year 2000...For the rest of this article, go to the New Yorker.

More Buddhist than the Dalai Lama

The Chinese government fancies itself as the custodian of Tibetan Buddhist orthodoxy. In 1995, the Chinese authorities kidnapped Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family, just days after he was recognized by the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama. The government then appointed its own Panchen Llama. If he is still alive, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima is now 18. Last August, the Chinese government announced new measures stating that all reincarnated lamas (tulkus) must have government approval. The State Administration for Religious Affairs insists that reincarnations of “living Buddhas” who do not have government approval are “illegal or invalid.” On October 10, the Xinhua News Agency published an article accusing the Dalai Lamma of showing compassion for “evil cults”:

Buddhist doctrine advocates good deeds and extrication from the earthly weal and woe. It has also long been viewing evil cults as the “feud of Buddha” and maintaining that “Buddha and demons do not coexist with each other”. The 14th Dalai Lama, who boasts to be a “follower of Buddhism” and “human rights fighter”, however not only has no hatred toward evil cults but instead shows a great deal of compassion for them.

On November 22, the Chinese government accused the Dalai Lama of being in breach of Buddhist religious protocol because he had suggested that he might appoint his successor. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao commented, “We believe the Dalai Lama’s remarks violate religious rituals and historic conventions.”

Shooting a Buddhist nun, as People’s Liberation Army soldiers are seen doing in this YouTube video, is presumably not a violation of Buddhist teachings. This incident was widely reported outside China.