Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Twenty-three: Confucius will be my Epitaph


I wrote this last time I was in China -- in 2006. It seems to fit with the other pieces I have written on this more recent trip so I reuse it here

Confucius will be my Epitaph

King Crimson
would be my epigraph!

or Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Song of Myself


A student in the audience put up his hand and asked me what the essence of American identity was. He had somewhat missed the point of my lecture, which had argued that there was no single essence. But, he thought, culture must have its particular essence. “For example,” he said, “in China, the essence of our culture is Confucius. We are all bound together by this philosophy.”

I had two answers in my head when he said this. One was to accept what he said about China and the Chinese and just reiterate the points that I had made about the United States, where, I maintained, there were things – events, perceived threats, experiences, social development, etc. – that might lead Americans to come together around certain beliefs, but that these are not trans-historical and they are subject to change as different things – events, perceived threats, etc – lead the country and the American people in more diverse and/or different directions.

The other response, though, would have been to gesture towards what in a way I was trying to do in my lecture. For, while I was talking about the United States and American identity, I had one eye on getting the members of my audience, about 150 Chinese undergraduate and graduate students at a prestigious university, to wonder about their own identity, and whether in fact it is reducible to any one thing. I am hoping my point got across to some of the audience, it clearly had not done so in the case of this student, though I am thinking that his need to reiterate “the essence” of Chinese culture was in itself a grappling with the confusion that derived from wondering about another society where there, at least according to this guest lecturer, there might be no such essence.


And, if I had taken this question head on – and if I had had the time available to me (this question had come at the end of a long session) – then I would have turned to Barbara J. Fields and I would have been off to the races. Why Fields? People may no longer remember an excellent essay she wrote in Festschrift for C. Vann Woodward, an essay that is most definitely Fields’ legacy to the study of the American South and American history generally (“Ideology and Race in American History,” in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, Oxford, 1982: 143-177). The essay was one that built on Woodward’s assault on the notion that race and racism ought to be the organizing principles on which the study of the American South should be based, and his lifelong endeavor to establish a non-Marxian class analysis in its place. Fields analyzed this difference in detail and endeavored to show that ideology was a more complex set of ideas than those who talked about race understood, and that it was therefore impossible to reduce the history of the U.S. South to a single notion like race.

One of the things that Fields did, which would have come in so handy for me as I was standing in that lecture hall, was to talk about ideology as comprising a hierarchy of ideas and values that people believed in, a hierarchy that was subject to change under different social conditions. So racism on its own could not comprise an entire ideology, although there might be a racist ideology, one that brought together a set of ideas, the fundamental weight of which was determined by racial prejudice. But racial prejudice would be one part of the ideology and it would be modified by other factors, so that in certain conditions these other factors might cause people to act seemingly in opposition to their prejudice.

One might think, then, of two different communities in the American South that might look almost identical with the same members of the communities holding the same set of beliefs and sharing an ideology comprised of the same elements – let’s say, gender beliefs, class practices, racial prejudice, regional norms, relations to the means of production, religion.

In one community this sets of beliefs might be ordered (in terms of importance) in one way, while the other they might be organized differently, thus:

Community A                                                 Community B

racial prejudice                                                     religion
     |                                                                           |
gender beliefs                                                  gender beliefs
     |                                                                           |
class practices                                                  class practices
     |                                                                           |
regional norms                                      relations to means of production
     |                                                                           |
relations to means of production                     regional norms
     |                                                                           |
religion                                                           racial prejudice

A certain set of events that happened to Community A, let’s imagine, led racial prejudice to be heightened. A high level of tension surrounding the sexual relations between a white women and a black man led to a lynching and racialism became the order of the day. In Community B, where they had heard of these events in A but had not experienced anything similar, they happened to be going through a religious revival of sorts, and while the churches were strictly segregated, there was some on-going charitable work being undertaken by the white churches on behalf of the black. Community C, meanwhile, was witnessing the squeezing of both black and white farmers by the wealthy landowners and merchants, who were coming together to fight the elite politically. 

As one can tell, with the same elements, one can write many (his or her) stories.

Let us jump back to the would-be present, if you will, in China.

In this classroom, I turn to the blackboard, grab my chalk, and ask my class what are the elements of Chinese identity that they have witnessed or learned about in their schooling. I would perhaps coax this out of them. I would say: “Obviously, Confucius, would be one, right?” Nods, all round. “Well, can we add Chairman Mao and Maoism to the list?” Fewer nods, but after a few students who may belong to the Party assert themselves there is general agreement that he and his philosophy should be added. “Well, does that mean we can also add Marx?” Less certainty here, because while the students have all been required to take classes in Marx, they have, simply because the course is required, seen the course more as a chore and have not really learned all their lessons as well as one might have wished – speaking purely as a teacher, of course! But, since this is a required part of their curriculum, they are willing to give this to me. I rush to the board and put it up there before they can stop me. 

Now I say to them, “Well, I have talked to a lot of different students while I have been here, and I have noticed that some have grown up in the city all their lives, while others have come to university and for the first time have just left their small villages. Can I then suggest that we put up a category ‘urban/rural’ to add to our list? Two students, who just the previous day have had a heated discussion between themselves but in my presence about the relative benefits of rural and urban living, smile and assert that yes, indeed, this should be included. 

Then, I push yet another gambit. “How about regional differences? I have talked to different students and some extol the virtues of the South over the north, some have looked askance at the northeast and have suggested that they want to go live in the southwest. What’s going on here? Can we include regional variation on our list?” Yes, yes, yes, I hear. 

“OK, well are there more than just regional variations here? Are there different ethnic types in these regions, so that perhaps we could have a category of ethnicity?” Mmmm, less certainty here.  As I am speaking, I am thinking of a recent work by Dru Gladney, called Dislocating China, and, of course, there is Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture that provides the theoretical underpinning for the work on China.*** Gladney’s work interrogates the notion of a single Chinese identity by looking at the Muslims and other ethnic minorities that inhabit the country. “Well, ok,” I continue, “I know that there are so-called minority populations in different locations, so shouldn’t we include something that allows us to register them in our hierarchy? I mean, perhaps, some people who have lived near these groups have a different feeling about them, than those people who have had no interaction with them. Perhaps, too, there are fundamentals between people in the mainstream and these people.” Oh, alright, if you insist, my audience seems to suggest.  Hey, I’m getting good at this, I say to myself; this is a lot of fun.

“OK, you’ve given me a lot so far, and you have given me Confucius at the outset, but are all Chinese practicing the beliefs and philosophy of Confucius? What about the religious practices of Tibetans, for example? Are there no Muslims and Christians in China? Didn’t I just hear that people were being instructed by Party officials to watch out for Christian evangelicals selling their wares – sorry, I am being facetious, I mean promoting their religion, of course?” Mmmm, perplexed looks. “Do Chinese Christians fit within Confucianism?” More such looks. “Oh, alright, let’s move on. “

“How about wealth? We are in a Communist society, after all, but is everyone earning the same from the same kind of work? Clearly not. You students here seem to be better heeled – sorry that’s an old English expression, meaning wealthy – than the people operating the elevators or standing by the door dressed in traditional garb to welcome customers to a restaurant. It seems to me that there is less division in this country than elsewhere perhaps, and certainly less poverty in the city than in most I have been to, but there must be some kind of status division and tensions over these, so shouldn’t a category that reflects these be added to our list. What do you think?” There seems to be growing tension here from some who feel less comfortable about where this is going. I write “status” up on the board anyway.

“And surely there are other things we might consider. How many of you,” I say, “have relatives or friends who are living abroad?” A surprising number put up their hands. “OK, call out some of the places where these people are. “England, and they don’t like it.” “Oh, ok,” I smile. “Denver, Colorado.”  “Paris.”  “Toronto.”  “Algiers.”  “Wow!” I say, “I never thought that that country would be included.” And the list continues with a number of surprises, and every continent on the globe included. “Well,” I say, “how does your interaction with those people and your knowledge about their experiences make you different from someone who hasn’t had those interactions and experiences or has had them with other people who have visited other places? And, if and when they return do they act differently from those who remained in China?” “Well I don’t ever want to go abroad,” one of them yells. Another says more quietly, “I’d like to visit Canada, I’ve heard it’s a pretty nice place.”

I opt at this stage not to talk about party affiliation, and not to return to Marx and Mao, as I feel that this might complicate matters as we move down the direction of globalization. Instead, I say to them, “Well, the Olympics is coming to the United States, and it is bringing in its train even more globalization than before. Do you think that is going to affect everyone in this room the same? If not, can we include globalization as one of the elements we need to take into consideration as we consider Chinese identity?” General assent.

“Well, this board is pretty much covered, isn’t it?” I seem to have scribbled all over it. “Is there anything else that we might want to consider?” One young woman who had been looking a bit disgruntled said,“You haven’t even mentioned gender. Haven’t you even noticed that 70 percent of the students sitting in this room are women?” I look knowingly, and say that indeed I had noticed this, otherwise how would I have been able to put these thoughts into her head since she is my invented character – and being rude to a professor is un-Chinse also, I suggest, reaching for some irony! “However,” I say, “I was waiting for someone to mention it, and I am very glad that you did so. “Oh,” she says, and she looks much happier now.

I then begin to play with all the categories ordering them in different ways to suggest that there might be alternative identities that could emerge within China. Following up on the student’s intervention, I suggest that gender may be an important aspect of identity to focus on. “For,” I say, “do not Maoism and Confucianism have conflicting views of the roles of women in society -- while Mao tends in the direction of equality, Confucius tends towards a stricter hierarchy with women subordinate to men? Perhaps it is the case, then, that the greater the degree of equality between men and women, the greater the felt need to turn to Confucius, in order to compensate men (at least rhetorically) for the loss of real status. As such, the rapidity of change occurring in modern China, the pushing towards greater social equality between the sexes in a crucible of globalization, may be leading to a new emphasis on Confucius. But if this is the case the other elements on the hierarchy of identities (as we are now describing it) makes this Confucianism qualitatively and substantively different from an earlier form – even while the outward appearance is the same.” 

“So, then,” I say, looking distinctly pleased with myself, “what is it that is the essence of being Chinese? Is this really always the same? Does it unite you with someone living in Chinatown in Toronto, or suburban Detroit, or Algiers, or Paris, or Bangkok? What does Mao have to say about Confucius? Shouldn’t the essence here be Communism? Is the essence as you say really Confucius? Is everybody confused yet? I hope so, because that is how you need to be. Welcome to modernity. May you enjoy the ride!  Or to quote from King Crimson:

            Confusion
            will be my epitaph.
            If we can make it,
            we can sit back and laugh.
            But I fear tomorrow
            I’ll be crying,
            Cryyyyyyy-ing……”



***Dru C. Gladney, Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities and Other Subaltern Subjects (London: Hurst & Co., 2004); Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

Twenty-two: Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- Big Brother, Little Brother

The following is not a verbatim account of a conversation with a single person; it never occurred as such. It is a fabrication of several conversations with several people, and some inventiveness to boot. It is nonetheless true.

“So how is it that you have a younger brother, given the one-child policy in China?”
“Well, as you can see, I am a woman. And everyone really wants to have a son, to continue the family name, or because they are much cheaper – they don’t cost you a huge dowry when they get married – and they can help support you financially in your old age, better than daughters can.”
“But I read that there are certain officials, nurse abortionists, who go around looking for women who are pregnant with a second child, and they ensure that, however late in the pregnancy, an abortion takes place. I have even read that there are some pretty ghastly situations with late-term abortions, the babies surviving, and then being drowned in a bucket. That sounds pretty incredible to the outsider, absolutely horrific, whether or not one supports the right to have early termination of pregnancy under certain conditions.”
“Well, it is particularly scary if you are a mother and you want to have a second child. You never know when a knock may come on the door, and someone will force you to go to a clinic to terminate your pregnancy – perhaps even do it right there in your own home.”
“Yes, it must get worse and worse during the pregnancy as you get closer to the delivery date, as you can feel the baby growing in you and you begin to identify with it more. I suppose it must be like the feeling of a miscarriage late in a pregnancy, and yet this is a case of anticipation as well.   No one, or few at least, anticipate a miscarriage; here one is imagining the worst all the time, from the outside intervention of the authorities.”
“Yes, I imagine that it must have been very hard for my mother.”
“But how did she and your father manage it – didn’t everybody in your village know that you were there, and that she was pregnant with a second child?”
“Yes, indeed, that would have been a problem. I am about five years older than my brother, so I remember when I was four-and-a-half my mother and father left the house, and moved away to another village to live with my grandmother. My aunt, my father’s sister, came to live with me, and so for several years I had another mother.”
“That must have been very strange indeed. Did you not feel abandoned by your parents, and didn’t you resent your brother as a result? I mean, resentment is usual in older siblings towards their brother or sister, but this must have been significantly greater.”
“Yes, I did feel abandoned at first. But it didn’t seem unusual. They said they had to leave for a while, and I missed them, but I didn’t really see it as my brother’s fault early on. I now find him a little insufferable – all he does is play computer games, and he has no interest in the things that I think are important, like politics and society; but then he’s just a boy.”
“So once he was born and he survived delivery, and the health officials didn’t catch your mother, what happened then? Obviously they couldn’t swoop in after the fact and kill your brother, as that would have been murder. So didn’t your parents and brother just come back and live with you, so that you were all together after the nine months?”
“Well, it isn’t that easy. And if it were, then more people would do it; perhaps the elite women would go and stay in the United States and have their babies and then return. They could also get U.S. citizenship for the child as well. But it doesn’t happen like that because if it was ever determined that my father or my mother had had a second child, they would both lose their jobs. As it was, my mother had to give up her job when she got pregnant and she just became a stay-at-home mother; it was imperative that my father never lose his job, as we would all then have been destitute. So we had to carry on the fiction for a long time. Indeed, I wouldn’t have told you if my father were still alive, but he died recently from cancer, and it now makes no difference.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. It must be difficult helping to support your mother and your brother; I am not sure how you manage to survive.”
“It is difficult. It is very difficult. But hopefully I will get a better job soon and we will all be ok. And then my brother will grow up and get a job too, which isn’t too many years away, and we should then be alright. Men can get jobs that women can’t, in today’s China.”
“Well, do you agree with the one-child policy?”
“Almost everyone does.  It is necessary to keep the Chinese population within limits. Our population is now 1.3 billion; without the policy, it would now be more like 1.7.  It has been a success.”

Twenty-one: Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- Critical Acclaim


I gave copies of Reaching 40 (my co-edited volume on Stockton College) to some faculty and administrators at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. This was a gift, but it was also part of an effort to help them understand what Stockton is and what it is like.  If they are to work with us and create articulations of any kind, then they should have a better sense of Stockton and I hoped that the book would be useful in this regard.

It turns out that I may have been correct in this. The following day after giving the book one of the professors informed me that she was very impressed with the volume and had found it a particularly enjoyable read. What she felt most intrigued by was the fact that as a volume commemorating the history of the college it wasn’t merely celebratory, which any volume about a Chinese university would have been. She was most impressed with this and found it inspiring, and she hoped that her colleagues would also. She herself believed in being critical and not merely accepting the positions of a regime, but she was surprised to see that a volume of this nature would also end up as an arena for critical analysis.

I indicated to her that this book was unusual for any commemorative volume in the United States as well, and that this is one of the things that makes Stockton unique – or distinctive, if you will – that it has always had spirited debate and conflict, and that it is for this reason that we (the editors) did not feel we should shy away from controversy in our anniversary volume. 

Monday, November 28, 2011

Twenty: Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- So Named


Standing in front of a class of university students going round the room asking for each one for his or her name and a little bit of biographical information – what they are studying and what their hobbies might be.  The range of the hobbies and interests is really quite diverse – music (from Beijing Opera to Cold Play), soccer (supporting A.C. Milan and Inter to a rising Shanghai team), mountain climbing, travel (only around China, so far), and so forth. 
One young woman stands up – the others have remained seated.  She says she is doing this because she wants to be remembered – apparently she has been successful.  She gives me her Chinese name, and she wants me to remember this – I will do, in a sea of unfamiliar Chinese given names hers is the one that remains embedded in my memory. But she tells me she is the founder of Girls Up! Is that why she is standing? is my rather predictable quip. And she laughs, as any American student would have done. No. It is a quasi-political and social group on campus trying to teach female students to empower themselves – to stand up for their rights and gain self-confidence (the kind of self-confidence that enables her to stand up in the class and demand to be remembered). Women are second-class citizens, she says, and this has to change. It is a good speech, and given that it’s made in English, her second language, she does an excellent job making her case.
Her name is remembered, but others in the class have been remembered also – in large part because they have named themselves, with European names that they have chosen themselves.  These names are intriguing.  There’s a Joseph, a Summer, and a Cindy. One begins to wonder how these names are chosen, when, and what leads to a particular name being decided upon?
Of course, many of them result from English language classes, just as in Spanish classes in the United States, the teacher will give each student a Spanish name, or will have the students pick their own. So is Summer influenced by O.C.? Quite possibly. Another student (not in this class) has called himself Caesar, as he was reading about the Roman Empire at the time he chose his name, and he liked Julius Caesar – he wants to go places – and apparently it’s Italy as he is an Inter fanatic. Another student names herself after a crime novelist, as she had wanted to grow up to be a writer. And yet another female student chose her name during the last World Cup and has a fascination for a German soccer player, whose name she has feminized.
These names are subject to change – as they grow up; when they go to America and they find their name is too popular, or not at all popular, or whatever; when they find out the name doesn’t mean or signify what they thought it did; when they decide they want to be seen differently.
But each name becomes a statement, a political act of sorts.

Nineteen -- Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- Renren For Your Life

The following is not a verbatim account of a conversation with a single person; it never occurred as such. It is a fabrication of several conversations with several people, and some inventiveness to boot. It is nonetheless true.


“Well, people of the older generation believe that you students are all too concerned about your cell phones, your texting, and your Renren, to be political anymore. They feel that things have changed since 1989, and that you have been bought off by the open door business developments that have occurred since then.”
“Well, that isn’t true, we are still political; we just know how to work the system better than in the old days. We know that we are being watched at all times, so we have to do things differently. Did you see the silent protests we arranged at the McDonalds? We just went down there and sat without saying anything, without even making any protest demands. The police and the authorities freaked when we did that; now they have stationed police cars there permanently to make sure that we don’t come back; but we surprise them by going to a new site.”
“So everything is just below the surface, ready to break out – is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes. We students are mostly liberal in our attitudes and beliefs, and believe in change for the better to allow for more freedom; so if these changes are coming on their own, then we don’t need to be protesting. But if things stopped and there seemed to be no progress in the direction that we want – then we would have to take a different approach.”
“So as long as the Chinese economy seems to be growing and the government can afford to share more rights with students and people generally, then everything is ok?”
“But, if things were to become bad economically, then things might well be different, and the Party knows this, so they have to keep a close eye on things.”
“Do you ever wonder whether or not there are agents working for the United States endeavoring to stir up unrest among the students?”
“Oh, we know there are. We all read the WikiLeaks transcripts that listed all the students and others who go over to the U.S. Embassy. They aren’t just going over there for a social visit.”
“Well, did they all get arrested? What was the response of the authorities to this leaked information?”
“There doesn’t seem to have been one particularly. I am sure their names are on a list somewhere, and if things turn bad, they would probably be the first to be picked up. But no one seems to take it too seriously. We thought it was pretty funny, all these names being listed.”
“What do you think of the Americans doing this kind of thing? And wouldn’t these students be considered traitors or spies by the authorities in some way – that would have been the case in the old days under Mao?”
“Well, it is all part of a game. I am sure the Chinese are trying to do the same thing – not necessarily by recruiting American students – although there may be some Chinese Americans with divided loyalties – who knows? It’s all part of the Great Game. But these people tend to want to learn information about the U.S. economy and business, rather than endeavor to destabilize things in the United States itself. As far as the Americans destabilizing things here, they can only really be successful if there is a great deal of discontent out there.”
“Yes, but as you have said, there is quite a bit.”
“Well, there can either be a political movement pushing for gradual change, or a protest movement endeavoring to disrupt things; we are the former, and under those circumstances, American penetration will have limited success.”

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Eighteen: Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- Reversal of Fortunes


I want to begin with three quotesThe first comes from President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, when he was beginning to recognize the importance of the Pacific following the conflict between Russia and Japan, and in light of the growing significance of China as a market for American products. It reads:

Our future history will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China, than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe.

This comment speaks for itself, and it must be considered prescient. While the first half of the twentieth century saw American involvement in world wars that were largely caused by the nation’s Atlantic connections, the latter part of the twentieth century saw the growing importance of the Pacific to the United States, with wars in Korea and Vietnam, and with the emergence of formidable economic powers first in Japan and then in China. It now seems demonstrably the case that the United States’ future will be affected more by relations with countries in Asia, than by those in an ailing Europe.

The second quote comes from Wang Tao. 

It reads:

The ways of life cannot be immediately unified; they must first be brought together by the tools or implements of human invention. The steamship and the railway are the carriages of the ways of life.... Therefore, these great inventions, which the western powers are using for their encroachment upon China, are the very things which the sages of a future age will utilize as the means for the unification of the ways of life of all the nations of the earth.

This comment coming from the period when European powers were beginning to have their greatest impact in China, suggests that Wang Tao believed that a time would come when the tide would turn in favor of China – that fortunes might be reversed – that while the penetration of China might be accomplished by “the tools and implements of human invention”, the “sages of the future” might deploy similar “tools” to expand those markets outward, with new beneficiaries, and use them to bring greater unification to the world. 

While Wang Tao seems very optimistic and idealistic – his view perhaps flavored by his positive connections to Christian missionaries – a less rosy view might see the descendants of those who have been victimized by Western intervention, at the very least, profiting by the connection to the descendants of those former imperialists.

My last quote comes from someone who is less frequently read than he once was, Karl Marx. While many in the West believe that capitalism hasn’t collapsed in the ways that he said it would, so that they question his theory’s predictive value, some nonetheless acknowledge that his analysis of the workings of capitalism was very astute. With regard to the history of commodities, for example, Marx has a great deal to say to us.

He writes: [I]t is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism, which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

Here, commodities are like religion, and they are like an opiate of the masses – they become a fetish, something that humans strive for, though in fact they often cannot understand the reason why. For me, this comment speaks to the reversal of fortunes that is occurring in the world. Western economies have lost their dominant position in the world, and instead of being able to profit from their control of countries like China and India, as they were able to do previously, they now find that the situation has been largely reversed. And the reason has been the creation of a culture in the United States, and the west more generally, that is largely dominated by commodity consumption. In a way this is a drug that seems far less insidious than the drug that European traders used to help undermine Chinese society in the 19th century, but it is actually equally addictive, and for the long-term prospects of Euro-American societies potentially even more destructive.

I am arguing, here, that relations between China and the United States need to be understood from a perspective that takes into consideration interaction that goes back to the mid-19th century. It is easy to be swayed by political or economic considerations of the moment, or by ideological differences and other geo-political concerns. But over the long dureé the picture that emerges from the American perspective is one shaped by economic considerations – the need for markets for surplus production, the need for labor to lower the costs of production, the need for cheap commodities to satisfy American consumers, and then, as the American economy becomes increasingly service-oriented and less capable of its own production, the need to pay debt to Chinese and other foreign creditors and redress a balance of trade that looks likely to remain in a state of imbalance.

At various times in U.S.-China relations there have been issues or political considerations that have seemed to overshadow these economic fundamentals. Between the 1880s and World War II, there was considerable racism on the part of American workers and others who wished to exclude Chinese immigrants, and during the Cold War era there were significant ideological differences between the leaders of the two nations. But historians tend to write history from the perspective of the present, and in light of the current situation these other issues seem of secondary importance and of less of a concern than the overarching economic history that I will try to outline here.

Part 1: The Encroachment Upon China

Wang Tao’s words (mentioned at the beginning) were quoted by Chinese intellectual, Hu Shih, during a lecture he delivered at the University of Chicago in 1935.  Hu Shih was speaking about the transformation that had occurred in China since the European war.  But he wanted his American audience to understand the state of China prior to the Revolution of 1911. He was clear about the fact that opium had been a major vehicle of change in China. He wrote:

By 1829 the opium import amounted to $10,591,760 gold, forming 49 per cent of all British imports to China. In 1834, it was $11,381,930 gold, forming 51.4 per cent of the British imports. It brought about the Opium War of 1840 and the Nanking Treaty, which gave Hong Kong to England and opened five ports to foreign commerce and residence. It was the first Chinese defeat in war with any European power. China paid for the defeat, but she never could understand why any civilized country would resort to war for the sake of keeping trade open and, least of all, for the sake of maintaining the commerce in a poisonous drug.

In his speech, Hu Shih made a telling comparison between, on the one hand, the first Europeans who had arrived in China in the 17th century, men who he felt had had a positive influence on China, and who had been welcomed, by and large, owing to their desire to learn about Chinese ways and not to disrupt all that they came into contact with, and, on the other hand, the merchant capitalists who had forced their way into China and swamped the population with opium, leading to two wars, and the complete prostration of the Chinese government and people in the face of European and American demands.

The world economy that would be dominated by the British and Americans up until World War I was fundamentally founded in the Opium Trade. It was this trade that made British Colonialism in India economically viable, and it was the so-called success of the British Empire in India that gave justification to the whole Euro-American imperial project extending from the Scramble for Africa through the acquisitions throughout the Pacific region. 

In the context of this collapse, Chinese international standing declined dramatically, such that Chinese immigrants in the United States began to suffer from it as well. American capitalists, like all capitalists over time, constantly feel the need for ever-cheaper labor. One of the key sources for this in the latter part of the 19th century could have been Chinese labor, and for many years after the settlement of California, Chinese indentured laborers were recruited to work in different industries.

In the British Empire the need for labor in the aftermath of the emancipation of slaves was largely taken care of by indentured labor from India. Plantation capitalists from the Caribbean to Africa and Ceylon, all the way round to Fiji in the Pacific utilized what they called “coolie” labor from India. The Chinese were considered as a possible alternative to Indians – particularly when there seemed some likelihood that the Indians would protest their conditions – but generally the access to labor recruitment areas was easier in India, so that British imperial labor needs could be taken care of without resorting to the importation of large numbers of Chinese laborers.

In the United States, however, following the Civil War and slave emancipation northern Republicans sought to protect Southern black labor from being discarded by the planters and replaced by indentured labor, and so they passed laws forbidding the importation of laborers into the American South from places like India and China. As industry became firmly established in the North, the supply of labor from European immigration was such that the northern capitalists could use the large pool of labor to keep wages depressed and undermine the unions – so there was no felt need to import large numbers of laborers from China. In the west, however, no such pool of labor existed, and with the Gold Rush in California, and the labor demands arising from the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the desirability of Chinese labor increased dramatically. 

While this was true from the perspective of the capitalists, the European workers who were moving into the region, drawn by the possibilities of making money in a growing economy, recognized that their advancement was threatened to the extent that indentured and other lower-paid laborers were being used for cheap labor. This led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which represented the triumph of late-19th century racism on the one hand, and the impact of the Europeans in China, affecting the Chinese rulers’ ability to protect their people from exploitation abroad.  For example, the Japanese government was able to respond to attempts to discriminate against Japanese immigrants in the United States, in part owing to the standing the Japanese maintained in the world. In the period of instability brought on by the opium trade, the Chinese Government could comfortably be ignored. 

For Americans, China was considered a vital outlet for their products. Leading capitalists, like John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie of steel production fame, believed that unless the United States was able to gain access to the huge Chinese market for its products, the American economy would constantly fall victim to over-production and end up dealing with economic recession, like the ones they had experienced in the 1870s and 1890s. This was a major impetus behind the war with Spain in 1898, which led to the acquisition of the Philippines, a gateway, in their minds, to China. These capitalists knew, however, that the United States was weak when compared to other nations in the Pacific region, and that they could not advance simply by using the might of a navy or the armed forces, as the British had done. In 1898, Carnegie observed, the British had a navy of 80 first-class warships, France had 50, Russia 40, Germany 28, and Japan was catching up with Germany quickly. The Japanese would show within six years they were more than a match for the Russian navy, and they were already far ahead of the Americans, who only had 18 first-class ships. 

What men like Carnegie believed was that the United States had three choices in relation to China. One was to continually rely on the support of the British to validate American claims. This had been useful in the procuring of the Philippines, but the British could not be relied on to always be supportive, and the tangle of alliances in Europe, might result in a combination with another country leading the British to turn against the United States. The second choice was to rapidly expand the American navy so that it could compete with the other nations – but Carnegie realized this would take more than 20 years to accomplish. The third choice, that Carnegie enunciated, and which the American government largely pursued, would be to create an alternative to direct colonialism, what Carnegie called “Americanism.”  Here the United States would endeavor to avoid using force – the foundation stone for most imperialist ventures – and promote moral suasion through what would come to be known as dollar diplomacy.

Carnegie wrote: Imperialism implies naval and military force behind. Moral force, education, civilization, are not the backbone of Imperialism; these are the moral forces which make for the higher civilization, for Americanism.

When “the world shall have a wholesome fear, synonymous with respect, for us,” … it will not be a good day for the Republic. Adherence to Washington’s desire seems better to me – that we should be the “friends of all nations” – a wholesome friendship instead of a “wholesome fear.”

Clearly, this wholesome friendship would be established on American terms, with profits coming to the United States economy as a result, but there was a belief that this nonetheless would allow for advantages for those peoples with whom the Americans would be establishing such relations. This was what Rudyard Kipling would describe as the White Man’s Burden, written to celebrate the success of the United States in acquiring the Philippines.

Under such circumstances it would behoove the United States to endeavor to establish an “Open Door” policy for China. Rather than creating conditions where single nations could have control over particular territories, as in the Scramble for Africa, the Americans under Secretary of State John Hay’s leadership argued for the right of all nations to trade equally with China. While this may have been preferable to a situation where the Europeans and Japanese carved up China among themselves, the terms of trade were very much in the foreigners’ favor, and the Chinese government appeared impotent in the face of this capitalist penetration into all parts of the country. This culminated in the Boxer Rebellion, the brutal suppression of the Boxers by Germans, British, and Americans alike, and the collapse of the Qing dynasty following the 1911 Revolution.

But the difference between the Americans and the European imperialists, at least in light of Carnegie’s perspective can be suggested in the career of the aforementioned Hu Shih. How Hu Shih came to be in the United States lecturing Americans on China says something about the different kind of imperialism Americans developed that would influence their interactions with the Chinese considerably. After brutally suppressing the Boxer Rebellion the Europeans and Americans sent the bill to the Imperial Government demanding that they pay the costs for their military campaign in China. While other nations, in typical imperialist fashion, treated these payments as mere reparations, the Americans used the money they received to create a scholarship fund for Chinese students to receive an American college education, and Hu Shih was one of these students, first coming to Cornell University in 1905. 

On arrival in the States Hu Shih shifted his interest from the study of agriculture to philosophy and literature and moved to Columbia University where he came under the influence of the philosopher John Dewey. He would later accompany Dewey to China and act as the translator for the American pragmatist when he lectured to numerous university audiences. Hu Shih returned to the United States in the 1930s (and he would later become the Chinese Ambassador to the United States between 1938 and 1942).

Part 2: The American Century, 1911 to 1989

The world was radically transformed in the period of World War One. This war saw the beginning of United States ascendancy – something that Carnegie had foreseen a little earlier – with New York City replacing London as the financial capital of the world. At the same time, the economies of other European imperialist powers were in shambles, with important implications for China. 

While the Chinese were experiencing the aftermath of their revolution, a number of the nations who had encroached on China were no longer in a position to continue to do so. This left the United States and Japan as the two most influential nations in the region, the Japanese quickly seizing German territories in China as one of the spoils of victory. The Chinese were left with a choice, previously imagined by Carnegie, between the imperialism of the Japanese and the seemingly more benign Americanism. As Japan began to impose itself more on China, with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Nanking Massacre of 1937, for example, the United States seemed, in the eyes of many Chinese, like Hu Shih, more of an ally against Japan than simply an imperialist. 

The collapse of the other world economies in the Second World War left the United States in a position where it believed itself to be economically insurmountable. Its own domestic market was sufficiently large that American companies very frequently could make profits based upon selling to Americans, and then endeavor to capture segments of the global market by unloading surplus products at below market prices, undercutting farmers and industrial producers around the world. 

Moreover, the United States no longer even felt the need for immigrant labor. The mechanization of farming left large numbers of African Americans without work, and these people moved to cities to become a depressed labor force, taking care of any needs for cheap labor. Meanwhile, with the new car culture emerging around the massive highway construction, undertaken as part of the New Deal of the 1930s and then accelerated under President Eisenhower, the foundation of the American formula for success – and ultimately failure – was laid. This was, essentially, the establishment of a relatively highly paid workforce migrating to spacious housing developments in the suburbs, funded largely by the industry that was benefiting from that same process of suburbanization. The fundamental shift here was something that had been going on since the 1880s, the move from being a culture of production, in which identity was formed around what someone did for a living, to a culture of consumption, where identity revolved around what one could purchase and consume. But this form of identity was far less stable than the producer mentality – it was fueled by the need to consume and to keep up with fashion, and the person who was hip, or fashionable today, was, if he or she wasn’t careful, likely to be considered passé or behind the times if his or her conspicuous consumption didn’t keep up with everyone else’s.

This consumption could initially be supported by the production arising out of American growth, and by the fact that the Cold War gave the United States a standing as a guarantor of stability in the world. Consumption is like a drug, however, the more one does, the more one feels the need to do. As with drugs, consumption highs are ever less satisfying, and need to be constantly fed. At some point, however, that consumption could not be satisfied by the Americanism formula. That formula was that American companies would, in spite of their high cost of labor, continue to prosper in the world economy, and be able to pay high wages. This meant that prices would be inflated, particularly for the home consumer. The need for new and cheaper commodities to feed the consumer would, almost inevitably lead to the rebuilding of other economies, and the development of new ones that could provide cheap labor – Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and then China – and then the flight of American capital to those areas where they could utilize that labor. Consumption would continue unabated in the United States, but it would be founded less and less on American productivity, and more and more on the ability of Americans to continue to borrow to pay for these, now cheaper, commodities.

As the nation turned from creditor to debtor it could continue to live the way it had done, only if other nations felt they needed the United States and the dollar as a source of stability. While the Cold War continued, and while the Russia and China remained outside the global market, American dominance and prosperity was a luxury that Europeans and others within the American sphere of influence felt they could afford; in 1989 things changed radically. So, in this regard, the loudly proclaimed and celebrated victory of the United States in the Cold War in 1989, with the collapse of Soviet Communism in Russia, was actually the death knell of Americanism, and the beginning of the decline of the United States as the global center of capital. This situation was further exacerbated by the fact that from 1989 China accelerated what it had already been doing earlier in the 1980s, namely opening itself up to a closer engagement with the global market. 

Part 3: Towards the Chinese Century

For a while, instability in the Middle East seemed to be sufficient to keep the United States in its position as guarantor of the world market, especially with the economic backing of some oil producing nations, who feared that their neighbors, like Iraq or Iran, might seek to undermine them in some way. But, committing so many resources to invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, left the United States with ever-growing mountains of debt, at a time when the declining wealth of many Americans has left them unwilling to support by their taxes the kind of government sponsored initiatives that might have opened up new avenues to the United States to become more competitive (as had happened in the past), or to keep the government solvent.

China clearly has benefitted from the transformation that has occurred since 1989. The need for cheaper goods to keep feeding the beast of consumption in the United States has seen the very rapid turn to China for the production of large sectors of the economy – with almost all major outlets from Walmarts to Best Buy securing their goods from China, and major American high-tech companies like Apple beginning to manufacture all of their products in China itself. And in conjunction with this the US trade deficit with China has continued to grow, and the debt that the Chinese now account for has become almost staggering.

According to the Guardian newspaper, during the debt crisis earlier this year, the U.S. Debt was more than $14.2 trillion. $4.5. trillion of this debt is held by foreign governments, the largest share of which, growing by the day, belongs to China, which owns $1.2 trillion of this debt. Of all the holders of U.S. debt China is the third-largest, behind only the Social Security Trust Fund and the Federal Reserve. The Chinese portion is considerably larger than those of other nations, with only Japan in close proximity. Of course, the largest amount of American debt is still owned by the American government and the American people, but the situation is worsening rather than improving.

I think the current situation was nicely encapsulated in this cartoon, with Hu Jintao showing Barack Obama both the Great Wall and the Great Wallet of China. The Republican Party, in particular, has expressed grave concern over the amount of debt owned by China. U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann, a candidate in this year’s primaries, joked that when it came to the debt, "Hu's your daddy." While this is obviously the exaggeration of paranoid humor and intended to blame the Chinese for American problems, it nonetheless reflects a situation where a reversal of fortunes has occurred. Where the Chinese were constantly paying debts of different kinds to the Americans throughout the American Century, the Americans are now constantly paying debts to the Chinese in what is fast becoming the Chinese Century.

The question now, from the American perspective, is what can be done about this state of affairs, with the United States’ position in the global economy drastically declining? In the short term, things are not catastrophic: China still needs the United States as a consumer for its products. Just as the United States would have suffered major setbacks in the past had countries to which it had loaned large sums of money collapsed, now the Chinese cannot easily withstand the complete collapse of the American economy. 

A brief analogy to the American situation prior to its intervention into World War I is apt. Most people think that the Americans came into the war on the side of the Allies because there was a special affinity between the Americans and the British. This was not so. The largest population group in the United States at the time was the German, and the second largest was the Irish – and both hated the British for obvious reasons. Rather, the fact that the American bankers had taken up so much British, French, and Italian debt, while not being able to do the same in Germany, meant that they had to join the war to protect their economic interests. If Britain had been defeated and had defaulted on its loans, catastrophe would have ensued in the United States economy, and in what was then a volatile society.

The same is true for China today. A great deal of the prosperity that can be witnessed now in Beijing, is a product of the country’s position in the global economy. If that global economy collapses, it would be very hard to withstand the social upheaval that would follow in its train. The perils of prosperity, as the Americans are now showing, can be found in the fact that one cannot guarantee that one will be prosperous tomorrow; and when the time comes that prosperity is on the wane, the level of expectations that cannot be met result in the kind of turmoil that we have seen this year, in Athens, in London, around Wall Street, and even in the Arab Spring.

But one thing is certain, no President of the United States can now ignore the words that Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the beginning of the last century. “Our future history,” Roosevelt had said, “will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China, than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe.” No doubt this was on Obama’s mind when he was in Australia last week, and when he said to other global leaders: “Let there be no doubt: in the Asia-Pacific in the 21st century, the United States of America is all in…The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.”






A shout out is necessary to: Arthur Power Dudden, The American Pacific: From the Old China Trade to the Present (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1992).  Particularly useful for the Opium Trade, Carnegie and Americanism, and providing an introduction to Hu Shih -- and much more besides.

Seventeen: Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- The Sense in Censoring

The following is not a verbatim account of a conversation with a single person; it never occurred as such. It is a fabrication of several conversations with several people, and some inventiveness to boot. It is nonetheless true.


A student staring at a picture on the wall of a small modern art gallery: “It is strange that the artist uses the date 1989 in his title. Why do you think that he is doing that?  Probably it is an allusion to the Tiananmen Square massacre, what the Party calls the ‘incident.’”
“What do you think it was then?”
“Oh, it was a massacre, all right.  Most of the students were gone by the time the army moved in, but people were killed when the tanks rolled over the barricades in the street, and there were some random shootings.”
“Well, do you get in trouble when you refer to it as a ‘massacre’?”
“Not really; only if you say it to the wrong people, someone who is in the Party who cares about it.  But there is so much censorship, and everybody is watching and listening to what you’re saying, so you do have to be somewhat careful.”
“So who’s doing the censoring?”
“Party members.”
“But if that’s so, how do you know who those people are? Do Party people look different from others?”
“Oh no, they don’t look any different, but everyone is pretty open about their membership.  You know who’s a member and who’s not.”
“Oh, so, you know who to be on guard around; basically all Communist Party members, right?”
“Well, not really. I’m a Party member.”
“Oh.” Double take. “You’re a Party member?  So why are you saying that it was a massacre and why are you complaining about the level of censorship, then?”
“Oh, everyone in the Party does.  No one really agrees with it, and while we don’t know the whole truth about Tiananmen Square, and we probably never will, we all assume it was a massacre, and not just an ‘incident.’”
“Oh….Hmmm… But you don’t support censorship, and you say others don’t believe in it, and you yourself aren’t doing it.  So how is it that it is still occurring?”
“Well, it is primarily being done by people who sit for the Civil Service exams.  All of us students know that it is, as you say in America, bullshit, and most of us join the Party just because it is a good decision to help us get ahead – in applying for jobs, and so forth – but we don’t believe in it.  It is only a select few who take it seriously and join up to do the kind of work that entails censoring others.  And those people you can tell are into it, and they end up sitting for the Civil Service exam.”
“So there is something like a hard core in the Communist Party, who are true believers, that you have to worry about?”
“Well, yes, except that there are many of students who are now taking these exams – I am taking them tomorrow, in fact – and we don’t believe in censorship, and I, for one, don’t know what I will do if I have to do that for a living.  But it’s a job, and there aren’t many around at the moment.”
“Hmmm!  So you are telling me that really even the hard-core members don’t really believe in this very much.  So how important is this censorship?”
“Well it occurs everywhere, but it isn’t that important anymore.  Our Facebook, which we call Renren has safeguards and censorship written into, so if you write something that seems at all inappropriate or threatening, to the system, for whatever reason, you get a message saying that what you wrote was inappropriate and that it has been deleted.  It happens all the time.”
“But doesn’t that scare you?  I mean, don’t you think that they are coming to arrest you when that happens and that you will be in trouble?”
“No, it happens all the time, and no one gets arrested – some of my friends have hundreds of these deletion comments – and nothing happens to them.  The comments get triggered by key words or phrases, so it doesn’t matter that much.  Sometimes someone from the party will ask you about someone else and what they might be doing, but you just say that you don’t know, and they leave you alone.”
“So if no one really cares about it, and they don’t do anything about it then why do they bother?”
“It’s like an insurance policy.  They won’t pick you up for doing it; they will pick you up for something else and use the fact that you have done this as the pretext for picking you up.  So as long as what you say doesn’t have a big impact you should be ok; but if you had a following then they would send someone around to invite you for a cup of tea, and then you would know that you are in their sights, and you had better behave.”
“Oh, so it’s like in America – no one drives the speed limit – everyone breaks those rules.  Do they want you to drive the speed limit and conform?  Of course they don’t.  If they did then they wouldn’t be able to pull over the ones that they really want to pull over for some other reason – because they are driving while being black, or because the police think they may have drugs on them – which may be the same thing.  So censorship is like that?”
“Yes, it’s like with those arrests occurring now regularly in the countryside.  You have someone who is organizing people to protest the horrendous conditions that exist in the countryside.  The authorities come along and they concede to all the demands of the peasants for improvements, just to stop the protests.  Then they wait a couple of months and they come back and arrest the leader.  This tells the people that it is ok to be led in a protest – but leading others in one is not ok and you will be imprisoned.  So the authorities end up looking good by responding, and they send a nice little threat along with the eradication of the protest leadership.  It is quite effective, actually.”
“But can it withstand the kind of protest, that might come about if there was a major downturn in the economy?”
“No, then things may get very ugly, and then they do have the lists of who has been doing things on their social networking accounts, or wherever, to draw on.  That may not be so pretty, and that is why they want to keep Twitter and Facebook out of China, so that they can control these social interactions more minutely.  But you also have to recognize that there is a second reason for all this censorship, and that is basically that it simply has to continue because it has been going on so long.  It is bureaucratically enshrined – and nothing created by a bureaucracy goes away without a fight – why? – You should know the answer to that.  It is because people’s livelihoods depend on it and they don’t want to give up these things.  There are people who are employed snooping into others’ lives; if you got rid of censorship altogether you would be laying off thousands of people, people, who one might add, have been trained to do precious little besides snooping on other people – this is their expertise, this is how they have been paid – and they are paid fairly handsomely – and if you took these jobs away, that in itself would lead to considerable unrest.”
“That’s a little scary, that something that no one really cares about actually continue because either some people in the future may care about it (and use it to round people up), or it gives people who don’t care about it jobs.  Where is the communism in this?”
“Oh that left a long time ago, and the closest thing you’ll find that resembles that is in Taiwan with the Nationalists. But, you know what?  I have to get up early for my civil service exams. If you don’t mind, could we talk about this at some other time?  Thanks.”

Sixteen: Shanghai Nights, Beijing Daze -- Mao or Less


Today (November 25) I went in search of socialism in Shanghai, which is rather like looking for a needle in a haystack. The least likely place to find it, of course, would be the Bund and Nanjing Road – the commercial pedestrian street near the river – but, nonetheless, that is where I began. The Bund is the area where the English settled after they gained access to the port of Shanghai back in the 1840s, and where they established their banks and other financial and capitalist institutions. It became, by the end of the century, and certainly into the 1920s, one of the major financial centers of the Pacific region.

When Mao came to power, the English and other foreigners left the area or were evicted, and all the capitalist institutions were replaced with government departments of various kinds. Now as you stand upon the embankment and look back towards the Bund, you can see that Mao’s revolution did not persist too much beyond his death. The capitalists are back in spades trumping all, and government departments have made way for them to reestablish themselves – from Citibank to Swatch. If you then turn around and look at the other side of the river, the older buildings of the early twentieth century that characterize the Bund, are faced with a twenty-first century cityscape that would rival even Hong Kong – perhaps not, but close nonetheless, and obviously closer than was the case ten or twenty years ago. With the lights blazing on both sides of the river from six o’clock in the evening, the view is quite intoxicating.

And then you see him. Mr. Socialism. Mission Accomplished. A large statue of Mao, just behind the elevated embankment, is also lit, though by comparison with the brightness of the Bund and the garishness of the other embankment, it has to be said that the Chairman looks to be in rather subdued light. His pose suggests (to me at least) that he is gazing at the Bund, and almost proclaiming triumph over capitalism and the British. We don’t need you and you will never return, seems to be the message he is delivering. And yet there he is, and all around him are those whom he once had evicted.




He is rather like the party guest who stands to one side, away from all the other revelers, and looks rather disapprovingly at them. He thinks that he is, or ought to be, where the party is at (surely this had once been so), and he can’t quite understand why it is that he is being overlooked, even ignored. Interestingly, however, he appears to be holding his coat under one arm, so he must be giving one last disapproving glance at all the other guests before leaving for home. One can imagine the host of the party coming over to him and asking him to stay, to put down his coat, and come and sample some of the rather tasty sangria. But the Chairman makes it clear that he is not happy with this; if he doesn’t decide how the party is going to be run, then he really doesn’t want to participate in it. Shanghai has become a cesspool of reactionary and capitalist thinking, he says; he is off to find some friends who he believes are to be found in the countryside.

Good luck with that, the host says, and shows him to the door.