Why was I, a toddler in the early 1990s, still singing "The East is Red"? Why was the only art project at pre-school to copy a sketch of Tiananmen Square? Why did every nursery rhyme have to end with (to the amusement of my grandparents) the befuddling phrase "down with Chiang Kai-shek"? Wasn't he already dead? Who was he anyway?
The answer to all these questions, in a super-fast, slightly disingenuous, and very un-nuanced way, is "because Mao Zedong won history". Out of all the single-party dictators who emerged out of the 20th century crazy, all ruling with censorship, personality cults, and violence, the Chairman emerged relatively unscathed, even though, let's face it, he did not have a light hand with doling out punishment. While "Hitler" is now synonymous with "evil" even to German people, Mao's granddaughter peacefully calls grandpa "a symbol of revolutionary culture". Nikita Khrushchev spent a considerable amount of energy candidly removing Stalin's cult of personalty, but my 1990s experience suggest that the same wasn't done for Mao in China. Japan's Hideki Tojo was sentenced to death at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, but Mao's face is still on a T-shirt. Even Mao's own wife could not retire gracefully from her political life.
To speak about someone like Mao without nuance in today's academic society is to flirt with danger. To paraphrase a real historian (not a wannabe one like myself), China is bigger, older, and more powerful than just about anyone else right now, Orientalism dictates that we shall treat this "other" society and its people with some type of exceptionalism. In other words (to paraphrase myself), it is currently trendy not to hate Mao. Gone are the days of "reds under the beds" or the speak bitterness campaigns about the excesses of the Cultural Revolution.
On another level, the appropriation of Mao's image has something to do with the now socially-acceptable attitude to socially-accept Mao with only a little reservation. It is not completely fair to compare Mao's legacy to that of Hitler or even Stalin, because Mao's image after his death became a carefully curated, useful tool to maintain social stability in the face of heavy economic and political reforms. In my view, this more closely resembles the exemption of the Japanese emperor Hirohito from the Military Tribunal in the aftermath of the Pacific War -- with the Japanese society in flux, the consistency of the imperial family's sanctity was maintained.
Mao's pervasiveness in Chinese culture (and indeed, that of the world) has become obscured with the impossibility for Chinese people to remember the 1950s and 60s without the official line, its sound-bites and its new canon. When Mao left behind his writings, a formidable collection of his likeness in propaganda art, and a country that needed to reform, and fast, he won history by leaving his successors no choice but to write it like he was writing it himself.
I recently spent a week in Taipei, constantly wondering why we seemed to be stuck in 1951. Taipei is one of my favourite cities where constancy seems to be one of the biggest virtues, but the anachronistic political attitudes of many who I had encountered puzzled me.
Of course, I was there to do "research", which meant spending all my daylight hours in an archive, trying to digest pages and pages of handwritten meeting minutes and press coverage of the KMT. These actions may well have informed the way I thought about Taiwanese society during the trip -- but they did not prepare me for some of the comments I had heard at the Occupy Central solidarity protest.
The most meaningful (and frankly what had caused me to leave) was on student organiser's speech: "Our ultimate goal is to take down the Chinese Communist Party." This was followed up "Taiwan and Hong Kong should unite and take down China." I was a bit concerned -- were we still stuck in 1950? Was the spirit of Chiang Kai-Shek channeled through the Liberty Square venue?
Another taxi driver voiced a slightly concerning sentiment: "I hate the DPP but the KMT is too weak to do anything about it. I wish the CCP will come and just defeat them all."Also present at the protest venue was the Pan-Green alliance ("Taiwan and Hong Kong should unify and defeat China because we are not them and we don't need them") and some kind of libertarian (ok, perhaps downright anarchist) student group selling T-Shirts that said "Fuck the Government".
Yet if you look outside of this cross-section of Taipei society, people seem happy, kind, and content with their way of life. My only unpleasant run-in was with a mainland Chinese tourist who demanded change from a 100 RMB note, in RMB, for a 50 NTD purchase at a fruit counter. Hong Kong's style of politically correct, polite dissent and mainland China's way of self-censorship seem to be foreign concepts in Taipei.
Perhaps this is positive, that the Taiwanese seem to be so comfortable with speaking their thoughts, even if such thoughts may be half-formed or inappropriate for a certain situation. None of this has put me off going back to the pleasant island for more work or leisure, of course, but the mentality does strike me as interesting.
I am currently trying to use my acute social observation skills to determine just how many students are skipping classes at the University of Hong Kong to occupy Tamar Park. The photos of the protest look almost idyllic -- sunny skies, green grass and a supportive culture of learning. It definitely looks like we are heading in the right direction if this is the form that protest chooses to take on.
The terms "civil disobedience" and "non-violent resistance" hold a special meaning that goes far off and beyond the broader terms of "protest" and "movement". To me, there is a certain type of conduct for participants in the art of protest that can make a movement more poignant.
If there is one key element of Hong Kong's protest culture that we should focus on, it is the grace with which the student protestors are behaving. Barring inappropriate usage of historically loaded terms, the peacefulness of Hong Kong student protests puts the so-called "activism" at my elite, Ivy League alma mater to shame. From throwing pies to booing off guest speakers to "rallying the troops" in anti-protest, the style in which Brown University students choose to show their discontent more closely resembles the shock value unprofessionalism of the Falun Gong than the palpable show of solidarity of Tiananmen.
Hong Kong students have demonstrated maturity, eloquence and elegance in their approach to issues within their own society. They have shown that they are capable, willing and ready to talk (and for enfranchisement, as such follows). I am impressed, and I am supportive of their methodology (the aims and key messages are the subject of a different conversation).
By refusing to hear questions and critiques, governments all over the world have alienated their peoples to shut the door on any semblance of democracy. China is one of the most visible examples of this mistake, but it is by no means unique. Yet when riots break out and force is employed, the legitimacy of both sides, including that of well-meaning activists, are undermined.
My hope is that Hong Kong students keep their calm, maintain their cool and keep carrying on their protest with this exemplary model of poise. For the students' opponents, there is no reason not to give such a huge number of well-behaved young people a conversation. Democracy is not about giving into demands; it starts, instead, with respectful behaviour.
"Despite pitched battles and ferocious skirmishing, it was a legume, not a legion, that claimed the life of the Taiping leader."
- Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller, Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese boys who came to America, went to school, and revolutionized an ancient civilization, p 81.
The above quote on the food poisoning and subsequent death of Hong Xiuquan perfectly represents the sense of absolute chance that I feel during the study of Chinese history. Hong, Hakka man, failed scholar, leader and instigator of the Taiping Rebellion and self-professed younger brother of Jesus Christ, is probably one of my favourite historical figures. My obsession with this fanatical man does not come with admiration or any shared values, but rather at the awe of how his inconsequentiality morphed, by complete coincidence, into his becoming the leader of the biggest civil war, like, ever.
History, in my opinion, is one of the very few academic fields where a scholar can write "by complete coincidence" in a piece of published writing and get away with it. Studying the history of China demands an open mind for just this type of odd discovery. I'll remember to do that when pouring over archival material and desperately digging for that one statistic, conducting an exercise in historiography to search for an article that contains just the right tone or abusing thesaurus.com for the perfect synonym of some distant cousin of "melancholy" with a hint of "schadenfraude".
Watch this space -- I'll have many more musings on chance's charming role in my finally-happening new career as a wannabe historian.
I suppose I have come to realise that the problems of writing a blog supposedly about "Chinese history" is that I have the laissez-faire to give in to any tiny traces of lazy writer syndrome by dismissing a potential topic as "not historical enough". I must apologise for my absence, and recognise honestly that my continued thoughts about Chinese history had initially been sustained because I was studying for a degree in the subject.
But now, I'm back, hopefully regularly, after mentally listing out a few topics that I have to cover for the sake of my integrity as a history "intellectual" and a blogger. This post started when I caught a televised debate on Phoenix Television about controversial Beijing University professor Kong Qingdong's recent remarks on Hong Kong civility and Taiwan democracy.
Professor Kong makes his television appearances sporting a Tang-inspired robe, a brightly-coloured, superfluous scarf and a noticeable smirk paired with a noticeable (but unfortunately fruitless) moustache. He said some controversial things on national television:
Kong's remarks and subsequent responses have gone viral, unsurprisingly, thanks to the considerable reach and depth of the Chinese social media scene. He's pissed people off all over the place -- last week's edition of Next Magazine in Hong Kong, for example, features a 5-page spread of opinions from local Hong Kong professionals about how they view his comments. However, is what he said really worth debating about?
It's not Kong's first time to make some scathing remarks as such, nor has it been (or will it be) the last. Previously, he had taken a stab at Hilary Clinton. Not long after the Hong Kong comments, Kong was also quoted as being dismissive towards Taiwanese democracy. He has become someone whose fame has been perpetuated by his infamy, and maybe one of only a handful PhD holders out there who is relevant within more than just his small group of nerds.
I just want to offer the speculation that Kong yearns to join the ranks of the nouveau-famous sensations created and aided by the proliferation of internet media, in order to have a platform to share their non-mainstream and highly contested views. My word for this kind of individual is a "scoundrel". Scoundrels do not get famous by working hard or producing quality output that the world actually needs, but rather, they would often resort to unsightly measures for the fame that they crave.
The process of being a scoundrel varies from one fame-seeker to the other. In this next section, I attempt to outline three types of scoundrels to identify Kong's rightful place.
1. The social media opportunist
Charlie Sheen's egotistical quotes on TV interviews and Twitter in early 2011 may have made very little logical sense, but they certainly got a lot of attention nonetheless. Subsequently, Sheen became one of the most followed Twitter users and generated one of the most popular hashtags of 2011. But his diligence to show the world that he was "winning" didn't stop with Twitter -- he shortly went on to launch "Sheen's Korner", a live-stream webcast that was supposed to broadcast his awesomeness.
Kong and Sheen have a couple of things in common -- they were both on TV, and they both offended some people in a very public and racist way (for Sheen, it was his remarks about producer Chuck Lorre). Then, they turned to social media to keep getting their names out there. Although Kong did not engage as actively in self-promotion as Sheen did, he certainly set him self up in just the right way to get shared, retweeted and commented on. He spoke in soundbites, such that his quotes could be re-posted just as easily as "Tiger blood" and "winning". He made sure everyone knows that he's a descendant of Confucius to differentiate himself biologically from the rest of us. Then he became trending.
2. The shamelessly hungry for fame
Okay, so I wouldn't make the point that Rebecca Black's assertion that "Sunday comes afterwards" Thursday, Friday and Saturday is particularly non-mainstream or highly contested, but she is a good example for the careless, shameless type of fame-seeker. Any sensible person re-reading the lyrics of "Friday" would realise the song's certainty of not only tanking but bringing its 'artist' hilariously down with it, but Rebecca forged ahead without caring about the quality of her product. Granted, it may be Rebecca's parents who should be held responsible for their child's output, but the end result is the same.
Was this also Kong's methodology? To get famous despite (or because of?) the awful quality of what he gets famous for? No matter how offensive his comments were, they were hardly sophisticated. His rudimentary and analysis that anyone who insists on speaking a dialect other than Mandarin is a "bastard" can be characterised anywhere between eccentric, rude and downright irresponsible, especially when the video in discussion had nothing to do with language. As a former student trained in the social sciences who would have gotten a big, fat "No Credit" on my report card with this kind of flawed reasoning, I am personally affronted that Kong could be considered to be any kind of scholar -- just as someone like Beethoven might be ashamed to call Rebecca Black an artist.
3. The hyperbolic culture-clash advocate
During my last semester of college I attended a release party for an on-campus Asian-American centric publication. One of the performers, a spoken word artist, stepped up to the microphone at the beginning of his set and expressed his excitement and support for all of us being there. He proclaimed, "what we're doing here: singing songs, writing poems, telling stories, is all resistance to cultural oppression!"
When I heard this, I almost spat out my mouthful of samosas and spring rolls to protest, in spite of the standing ovation that the speaker was receiving from those around me. (Or would it have been more effective for me to protest with my mouth full to reinforce the indignation?) Cultural oppression? Please. It's great that a group of self-identified Asians could come together to write a literary magazine, perform and eat Asian food, but the last time I checked, there were no burly white males breaking down the door to silence us.
A more high-profile example of this kind of scoundrel is Amy Chua, whose recent book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has already received a telling off from me. These such individuals harshly evoke racial or cultural problems and use these to justify their exaggerated claims, regardless of whether or not these problem actually exist. A few simplistic and rational rebuttals are all that are needed to respond to Kong's ridiculous accusation that Hong Kong's legalistic system has caused its citizens to become uncivil, but his quick, sensationalist words had already done their damage.
At the end of this post, I'm inevitably thinking about whether it's worth the bother at all to write in this much detail about how pointless it is to take Kong Qingdong seriously. The only people who should be feeling terribly angry at his outbursts and appearances should be his students at Beijing University, for having paid school fees to be taught by someone with absolutely no integrity. However, he's caused a stir, and though it's hard to tell all 1.3 billion people to calm down, more people should be realising that he just wanted some attention.
I had a professor in college who in one 160 minute class on the Chinese Ming Dynasty, lectured for 20 minutes about the nautical superiority of Admiral Zheng He's fleet, then spent the rest of the time showing a documentary discussing the possible truthfulness of Gavin Menzies' 1412 Hypothesis on Zheng's supposed discovery of the American continents decades before Christopher Columbus.
However controversial and 'hot-topic' Menzies' book was, I couldn't help but feel a little slighted at using precious class time to watch a documentary about a piece of writing that did not have the necessary scholarly calibre to be deemed worthy in my Ivy League mind. Inevitably, I dozed off in the big lecture theatre after a while, shaking my head incredulously about why Menzies' claims were such a big deal.
I didn't really think about Gavin Menzies too much for the next few years--after all, I had use my time to think about REAL historical problems. Then I picked up a copy of Age of Empires III with both expansion packs (Asian Dynasties and War Chiefs) for dirt cheap, and in my usual, compulsive way, began to complete all the campaign missions.
The campaign focuses on the Chinese civilisation is based on Menzies' hypothesis, and the player controls a fleet of Chinese explorers who land in the New World. The sailors battle East Asian pirates, the Zamorin in India and finally the Aztecs when they reach their destination, however the campaign ends with the Chinese sailors returning home after removing and hiding all the evidence of their presence on the American continent.
Diehard history empiricists would cringe at Ensemble Studios' choice of storyline for this campaign. After all, the Japanese and the Indan campaigns were built around events that, well, actually did happen (the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate and the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, respectively). So why go for the obscure, almost conspiracy theory-like subject of a controversial what-if story for the Chinese?
I also thought about the campaign from the other AoE III expansion pack, the WarChiefs--the plot follows a patriotic American family through the Revolution and their friendship with and support of native American societies.
We've got the Japanese, Indian and American campaigns, which all have quite a few things in common--national unity, independence, triumph against imperialism... These are good, solid, hearty themes that are brought out through the gameplay depiction of important, nation-defining moments in Japanese, Indian and American history.
Japanese campaign intro
Indian campaign intro
The Chinese campaign, on the other hand, sticks out like a bit of a sore thumb. Zheng He (or his AoE fictional counterpart, Jian Huang) was perhaps a nautical mastermind, a fantastic leader and a national hero, but never reached the nation-building significance that leaders in the Tokugawa unification or the 1857 Rebellion held. Zheng He's travels and exploration, while remarkable scientifically and culturally, ultimately did not add value to the Chinese empire, state or nation. Even if he did reach the New World in 1421, the expedition, frankly, did not accomplish very much.
The beautiful themes of nationhood, loyalty and strength in the other AoE III campaigns are conspicuously missing from the Chinese campaign. Instead, the story follows a lot more like fictional what-if ideas or even conspiracy theory, disappointing history buffs (who are most impressed by well-researched historical video games) like myself.
Of course, the next question is, why? Why does the Chinese campaign sem wishy washy in comparison with the others? Why is it about a period of supposed history might not be real, and that certainly very few people outside the United States care about? I would have liked to see a campaign based around the Taiping Rebellion, the biggest civil war our world has ever seen, the establishment of the Ming dynasty in the 14th century that ended the foreign Mongol rule, or the Qing Qianlong Emperor's expansion efforts that doubled the domestic borders of the Chinese empire. For China, a state, civilisation and empire that has had such a lengthy history, is the myth around 1412 really something worth making a high quality video game around? Are Americans just really that obsessed with the possibility that China could have taken over the continent first?
Then I realised one very major difference between the way I think and the way the dame developers think--that is, I'm willing to take sides. For the Tokugawa unification, the Indian Rebellion and the American Revolution, the good guys and the bad guys have since been clearly defined. No gamer is going to criticise Tokugawa's important contributions to the Japanese state, the Black family's attempts to stop the Battle of Little Bighorn or the Indian sepoys' fight against the injust British rule.
The Taiping Rebellion is too bloody, and has no real protagonist besides its power-crazed yet charismatic failed scholar leader who believed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and angered both the Western world and the Qing dynasty. Hongwu, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, was a poor peasant who conducted agrarian land reforms, and received a nod of approval by Mao Zedong. And the Qianlong Emperor's successful efforts to expand his territory during the golden age of the last dynasty included establishing suzerainty over controversial regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang and Vietnam, and were overtly colonial. None of these "real" historical figures are "good guys" comparable to their counterparts in the other campaigns, because the "real" history of China still remain so very debated.
1412, albeit probably fabricated, is entirely safe. It might be tame, its recreation in AoE III might draw too heavily on interactions with other civilisations (Indians, native Americans) to be considered a bona fide "Chinese" campaign, but it doesn't get Ensemble Studios into any hot water with possible accusations of supporting fanaticism, socialism or colonialism. In other words, making use of what-if non-history seems to be the only way to remain completely politically correct and not take any sides when conducting a discussion on Chinese history--at least according to one of the most popular historical real time strategy games of all time.
Perhaps it isn't fair to insist that game developers develop their own historical and political views, and create their games with historical purpose, significance and relevance in mind. Are video games are purely for the purposes of entertainment? Does it matter what the AoE campaigns are about, as long as there's plenty of fighting and awesome graphics?
A nagging feeling at the back of my mind makes me uneasy of this simple dismissal. If gaming is going to blatantly discuss 'history', then it needs to show some historical responsibility.
I'm watching Masterchef Australia, season 3. Now, usually, this is a highlight of my day or week--there's something about the excitement of Masterchef Australia that makes me really happy when I'm watching the show. Please note that this does not apply to Masterchef US--the American version is arbitrarily exploitative, gratuitously mean and probably some of the guiltiest guilty reality TV watching that exists.
Today, however, Masterchef AU has got my blood boiling. The reason for this unhappiness? The contestants are cooking a fantastically gourmet meal for ("His Holiness") the Dalai Lama.
Now, I'm not a hardcore PRC loyalist, and I especially want to point out that I'm not against the Dalai Lama's reception by Western media figures, celebrities or even political figures. I think he can be a powerful and important symbol for peace and international cooperation, and should have the appropriate attention and support when his cause is worthy. I even thought it was cute and amusing that he had spent his last visit to Australia with Bindi Irwin.
But it's what Masterchef represents that is inherently incompatible with a Buddhist, spiritual leader. Masterchef is about fine dining, fancy ingredients, sparkly presentation and gourmet (read: expensive and small) food. On the other hand, what do we think of when we think about Buddhism? Humility, modesty, suffering... And what do we think of when we think of Tibet? It's a politically-uncertain territory, represented by a government-in-exile and controlled by a powerful military, a culture that is said to be 'feudalised' by its system built around landholding noblemen and monastries.
"It's just food", narrates Ellie when the Dalai Lama holds her hand and seems to be forgiving her for not getting her planned dish on the plate. But that's just the problem--it's not just food. It can't be, and it shouldn't be just food to someone who represents a poor, uneducated nation, who is supposed to embody frugality and subsistence. At least she managed to plate the gnocchi up, otherwise I would be expecting a well-deserved discussion about the waste of food.
Instead, the utmost importance of food is dismissed with a flowery sentence about the Dalai Lama's appreciation for the contestants' efforts, and the episode seeks to be emotive by being fluttery. Dani giggles like the ridiculous fangirl she is, as the Dalai Lama speaks a few phrases of what sounds like broken English (is that all he picked up during his many years in India?). Guest judge and 'the original ABC' Kylie Kwong, in her usual costume of all black, too many rings for the food safety department to approve of and dark-rimmed glasses, shows him around the pantry and speaks to him as if he's a little child ("That's cheese! You like cheese, right?").
In the end, even Ellie's rivals' generous help in helping her get her dish together doesn't save her from going into an Elimination Round--not exactly a triumph for compassion.
The judges and the Dalai Lama preparing themselves to eat through prayer. Photo credit The Daily Telegraph
In my last history class in college, we read memoirs on the Cultural Revolution and the crazy fanatic qualities that the Red Guards exhibited when they gathered in Tiananmen Square to greet their idol, Mao Zedong. We went around the small seminar room and each student thought about whether there is any celebrity, politician or public figure of any kind that could make us go crazy like that. Unsurprisingly, we couldn't come up with anyone whom we would idolise in that way.
Watching the star-struck faces of the Masterchef contestants, hearing their tears at small setbacks and out-of-breath, irrational claims ("The Dalai Lama just touched me!!!" - Billy) and Kylie Kwong's deep bow before the food is presented, I realised that the fanatic behaviour attributed to the Red Guards towards Mao can be replicated on 'reality' TV with clever writing and video editing, in a situation where the so-called 'fans' had never really been emotionally attached to the idol.
Isn't the media eerily powerful in an absurdly inappropriate way? Isn't it scary that the Western media can downplay the stark realities of the lack of food and resources, and instead focus on sugarcoating a political figure, in the same way that the CCP was able to during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?
