• Shortlisted, 1998 George Freedley Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association
• Shortlisted, 1997 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Pacific Rim Voices Project

CACOPHONY! Cymbals, gongs, and drum demand attention. Their incessant beating fills up every corner of the theatre. Their rhythm and pace are urgent and exciting, as if to say, This is important! Something is about to happen! The musicians sitting on stage left in clear view of the audience are intensely focused on their leader, who furiously beats a small drum on a tripod with two sticks. The stage itself is fully lit but bare except for a carpet.

Suddenly a whirlwind of colour blows in from stage right, quickly followed by another. Fantastic beings, made larger than life by enormous shoes and padded shoulders, leap before the audience. They wear heavy, gloriously embroidered costumes and hold tasselled whips out at their sides, making them undulate. Four pennants rise from each of their backs and flutter as they move. But the most astonishing thing about them is their faces, painted in bold and calculated designs of many colours. Everything gives the impression that some mythical creatures have taken the stage. Then one of them begins to sing. A powerful and arresting voice resonates nasally. The delivery is aimed directly at the audience.

A first visit to the Chinese opera is an overwhelming experience of colour, sound, and movement. The dramatic tradition of China is a blend of song, speech, mime, dance, and acrobatics, held together by theatrical conventions resting on a concept of drama quite different from the realism and naturalism that have had such influence in the West. A realist play re-creates a story on stage down to the smallest detail. The characters are unaware of the audience; actors are trained to believe in the situation so that the audience will too. The Chinese tradition, how- ever, presents rather than reproduces the story. Waving a tasselled whip indicates riding a horse, and letting it hang straight down from the finger-tips shows that the rider has dismounted. There is no need to bring a live animal on stage to convey the idea of a horse. The stage is bare to give the actors the imaginative flexibility they need to suggest what is happening. Walking in a circle around the stage, for example, conveys making a long journey. When they arrive at the end of their journey, they may use mime to open an imaginary door and step over an imaginary ledge into a house. A table and two chairs can become a mountain from which a general surveys the battlefield. Acrobatics indicate the war.

These stage conventions make the performance accessible. The audience also finds clarity in the make-up and costumes of the actors. It knows when it sees a man in oily white make-up that he is crafty and not to be trusted, just as a man in red make-up is courageous and generous. The inner hearts of these characters are painted on their faces, as are their specific identities. The audience sees a given facial design on an actor and knows immediately that he is portraying this particular general or that particular legendary being. Costume reveals the character’s social station. An actress appears in a red and gold embroidered gown with tasselled cape and an elaborate headdress. The audience instantly understands that she is playing an imperial concubine. Thus an audience can size up characters pretty well before they have uttered a word. But then they do speak or sing, addressing the audience directly and giving a synopsis of who they are, what has happened to them, and why they are here now. Once characters have performed this introduction, they are then free to engage others as the scene progresses.

Musical styles and stories vary among the many regional operas of China, but conventions are generally shared. They use accepted and familiar methods of demonstrating how something occurred. The audience delights in watching how well these are executed. Much like the audience of a traditional Western opera, Chinese opera-goers know the story very well before it begins. They are there to enjoy the execution of a particular aria, acrobatic scene, or much-loved part of a story. Right into the twentieth century people would come into a teahouse or theatre in the middle of a performance and chat or eat, waiting for favourite spots.

This approach to the theatre goes back century upon century. When Chinese drama begins depends on how you define it. It is crucial to keep in mind that drama in China is a synthesis of many arts and tracing the development of the one means tracing the development of the many. A good example is an exorcism performed in Taiwan in 1982.An elderly woman was afflicted by devils. The Taoist priest arrived on the scene in ceremonial robes to do what was necessary to free her. He breathed fire and had a battle of wits with the demon, played by a masked assistant. He spoke, he sang, he gestured. The battle with the infernal reached its climax with acrobatics and dance that went on far into the night. There was great drama and great seriousness in this event. Priests in the second millennium BC used dance in ritual with the same seriousness. Oracle bones -the shoulders of oxen or the shells of turtles, inscribed with divinations -tell of Shang dynasty priests performing rain dances. These shamans used ritual dance as well in spiritual communion and in exorcism.

Dance in later dynasties performed the function of memory. The Great Warrior Dance, called Dawn in Chinese, re-enacted how the King of Zhou overthrew the Shang in 1030 BC. Lines of court dancers imitating a battle performed Dawu and kept an important event alive and present. A later dance in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) told the story of Prince Lanling, who was so good-looking that his enemies would not take him seriously in battle. His wife made him ferocious masks to solve the problem. This performance gives us an example of combined dramatic elements -a dance that told a story and employed masks -and the tale of Prince Lanling is still alive on the Chinese operatic stage. Another dance from the same period was The Stepping and Swaying Lady, A woman walked and swayed on stage lamenting her sad fate: her husband abused her when he was drunk. A chorus sympathetically joined in, but then her husband entered, his nose red from drunkenness, and they fought. The elements of drama are all here: music, singing/movement, a situation, characters, and even, as the red nose suggests, make-up.

Another example of the meeting of dramatic elements comes in the person of the court fool. The Zhou kings counted jesters among their entertainers. Like the Elizabethan fool, the Chinese court jester performed comedy and had a certain licence to speak more frankly than others. The name of one of them, Jester Meng, figures in the development of Chinese drama. One day, the story goes, Jester Meng encountered a young man cutting and selling wood to stay alive. This man, it turned out, was the son of the late prime minister, who had served his king honestly and well. Now that the prime minister was dead, however, his son was reduced to poverty. The jester promised to help and then proceeded to spend an entire year preparing the role of the deceased official. He practised his mannerisms, walk, and appearance. When ready, Jester Meng performed the role at a banquet before the amazed king and appealed to his conscience. Apparently, it worked.

The fool turns into one of the first definite role types in Chinese dramatic history, and that is another story. Around the third century AD, a high-ranking minister stole some silk from his king. He was found out and his punishment was to be a terrible one -humiliation. He had to dress up at banquets, presumably in the silk that he stole, and play the butt of the court fool’s slapstick jokes. This quickly became a successful entertainment known as adjutant drama, either because the official was an adjutant or because one fool performed so well that he was awarded adjutant status. By the beginning of the Song dynasty (AD 960-1279), the adjutant drama had expanded to five set roles, becoming something new -an entertainment in the form of a play. The adjutant had become a character type called a fujing, and the character who made the adjutant the butt of jokes had become the fumo. Three other roles -a woman, a man, and an official -were added, though they were sub- ordinate to the other two.

About the Author

Siu Wang-Ngai is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britian and Chair of the Federation of Hong Kong-Macau Photographic Association. He lives in Hong Kong where he practices law.

Peter Lovrick has taught the History of Performing Arts in China at the University of Toronto’s East Asian Studies department for the past several years. He also teaches full time at George Brown College’s English and Liberal Studies Department.

[Note: Due to technical difficulties, Chinese characters present in the text are not reproduced in this excerpt. We apologize for the inconvenience.]

Chinese was the principal vehicle of culture and civilization for the whole of East Asia for many centuries and today is spoken by more people than any other language. The earliest known examples of written Chinese are the so-called ‘oracle bones,’ records of divination from the last capital of the Shang dynasty at Anyang. They date from approximately -1300 to -1050. From the following centuries, after the founding of the Zhōu dynasty, come inscriptions on bronze vessels recording royal donations and other such events. The earliest of the Chinese classics — parts of the Book of Changes (Yjiīng), the Book of Documents (Shūjīng) and the Book of Odes (Shījīng) — also date from the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty. All these texts are written in an archaic form of Chinese referred to as preclassical.

The classical period proper begins with Confucius (-551 to -479) and continues through the Warring States period to the unification and founding of the empire by Qín in -221.  This was the period of the major philosophers and also of the first works of narrative history. Though all the productions of the period are in Classical Chinese, there is considerable linguistic diversity among them. This is, no doubt, partly the result of the geographical disunity and decentralization of the country, which allowed various regional dialects to become the vehicles of literature in their own areas. It is also the result of historical evolution. Exhaustive studies of these differences have yet to be made, but one can distinguish at least the following: (a) a rather archaic form of literary language, showing features in common with the Shījīng and probably based on a central dialect, used in historical texts such as the Zuŏzhuàn and Guóyù ; (b) a Lŭ   dialect used in the Confucian Analects (Lúnyŭ; more archaic) and Mencius (Mèngzĭ; more evolved); (c) a Chǔ dialect used in the Lí Sāo  and other early poems of the Chǔcí; and (d) a third-century dialect found in texts such as Zhuāngzĭ, Xúnzĭ  and Hān Féizĭ, showing an evolution towards a common literary standard but still with marked differences between different texts.
With the imperial unification under Qín and Hàn towards a common literary standard was accelerated, not only by the centralization of the government, but also by the increasing tendency towards imitation of classical models in preference to the living spoken language. An important influence in this respect was the triumph of Confucianism which made the Confucian classics the basis for education and for advancement in government service. In a comparatively early text like the Records of the Historian (Shĭjì) one can still detect influence from the spoken language, but as time went on Literary Chinese (wén yán) became increasingly a dead language, playing a role like that of Latin in Western Europe, from which the current spoken language increasingly diverged.
Literary Chinese was never completely static and uniform. Different styles were fashioned by successive literary movements and for special purposes such as government documents or Buddhist writings. There was no development of a prescriptive grammar and people learned to write by imitating earlier models rather than by obeying explicit rules as in the case of Latin. The spoken language always had some influence even in belles lettres and poetry, and still more in writings of a more practical nature. The result is that even those well versed in classical texts may have difficulty when they first encounter later material, such as official documents of the Qīng dynasty.

Chinese characters are sometimes referred to as if they directly represent ideas. This is a fallacy. Even though many of them are pictorial or otherwise iconic in origin, in their use as a system of writing they are conventional symbols for particular spoken words. Thus synonyms (words that are the same in meaning but different in sound) are normally written with different characters, while homophones (words that are the same in sound but different in meaning) may be written with the same character. For example, quăn ‘dog’ is written  , based on a pictogram for ‘dog,’ but gŏu,  which also means ‘dog,’ is written  , with a distorted form of   + gŏu   ‘hook’ to represent the sound. On the other hand, ān ‘how? where?’ and ān ‘peace’ are both written   .

Since in Chinese, as in every other language, the spoken form is primary, it is desirable to get back, as closely as possible, to the actual sounds that underlie the characters. Unfortunately, since the characters represent whole syllables and give no direct phonetic information, and since the sounds have changed greatly over the centuries, this is only possible through a difficult process of reconstruction. The most widely used system of reconstruction is that of Bernhard Karlgren as published in Grammata Serica Recensa (1957). This gives two reconstructions, one for what he calls Ancient Chinese, based on the Qièyùn, a rhyme dictionary of +602, and one for what he calls Archaic Chinese, based on the rhymes of the Shījīng, relevant to a period terminating around -600.
A revised system of reconstruction for the Qièyùn, called Early Middle Chinese (EMC), together with a reconstruction for Late Middle Chinese (LMC) of the Táng period, which together replace Karlgren’s Ancient Chinese, is published in Pulleyblank, Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin (1991), which also contains a new reconstruction of Early Mandarin (EM) of the Yuán period.
The reconstruction of stages earlier than EMC is a much more difficult problem since the available evidence is more fragmentary. While the rhyme patterns of the Shījīng, worked out by scholars of the Qīng period, and the rhyming of poets at various periods between then and the Qièyùn provide evidence for the evolution of the finals, that is the rhyming parts of syllables, comparable systematic evidence for the non-rhyming parts, the initial consonants or groups of consonants, is lacking. Anything that purports to be a complete reconstruction of Old Chinese (OC), such as Karlgren’s Archaic Chinese, is bound to be somewhat illusory at the present time. In this Outline, reconstructed readings in EMC or LMC will be given from time to time for illustrative purposes. Tentative reconstructions in OC will also sometimes be given, marked with an asterisk *.
Apart from systems of reconstruction which propose actual phonetic values, there are some traditional methods used by commentators for indicating how characters should be read that readers of classical texts should be aware of. These are the traditional spelling system known fănqiè and the system of indicating the four ancient tones by small circles at the four corners of characters.

About the Author

Edwin G. Pulleyblank is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.

• Winner, 2005-2006 Raymond Klibansky Prize, Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme (ASPP)

The presence in folk art of theatrical and artistic conventions raises some interesting points about the historical nature of the subject. If the graphic representation of historical narratives was produced as a set of conventional but evolutional motifs, can the historical narrative be understood in those same terms? I have thus far insisted that nianhua cannot be taken as a literal representation of anything that they may represent, and that the most we can take from nianhuais some indication of how subjects were cognitively ordered. So, without claiming that people really believed history to be synonymous with endless variations on the themes of classical romances, nianhua may still provide some insight into how history was understood, not as a grand cycle of rise and decay as Dun Lichen would have it, but as a conventionalized historical landscape.

The theatre was thoroughly historical by nature, and as if to prove the point, one of the few theatrical prints to place the action in the context of an actual theatre includes the following inscription: “We (actors) praise good and punish evil by differentiating what is good and what is not; and the deeds of a thousand years are before your eyes. We’ll tell tales about the world, sing ballads of ruin, and show where happiness is and where it is not. The history of seventeen dynasties lies before your eyes.”

Much as aesthetic and narrative considerations have interceded to provide the “Seventeen Dynasties” (or elsewhere “Twenty-Four Dynasties”) with a nonlinear reconciliation, the influence of more orthodox views of the past continue to be apparent in the world of nianhua print. In one excellent work on Yangliuqing nianhua, Li Zhiqiang and Wang Shucun have carefully organized a broad selection of prints to represent historical tales from each of China’s major dynasties from the reign of the Sage Rings through to the Qing dynasty. Their volume does demonstrate that nianhua printers had a profoundly developed historical consciousness, but the clear progression through the dynasties is very much the work of the editors and does not suggest how or if the original artisans shared that conception of order.

Fortunately, nianhua printers did produce a number of works that combine a selection of historical tales within the same print. Because they are fixed in their relative positions, the arrangement of the components provides a better perspective on how the artist organized the past as relative themes. What is most evident from these examples is that nianhua printers were not bound by linear temporal rules. Two such examples from the Alekseev collection, published by Wang Shucun and Boris Riftin, contain a total of sixteen historical episodes. A fixed order of printing, of course, does not predetermine a fixed order of reading, but assuming that the literate viewer read them in a literary manner - from top to bottom and right to left, then the order proceeds with no regard to chronology. Nor can any but a completely random order of reading produce a chronological sequence. It must, on that evidence, be concluded that the examples were not chosen for their adherence to dynastic succession, but for their moral, didactic, or narrative qualities. A few examples will suffice to give the tone of these narratives:

• Yan Guang (Yan Ziling) of the Eastern Han refuses to take up office when invited by Emperor Guangwu, preferring to spend his days fishing.
• The Han dynasty royal consort Wang Zhaojun is betrothed to a Xiongnu chieftain and goes to live beyond the Great Wall.
• Su Wu (a Han dynasty envoy) is captured by the Xiongnu but refuses to cooperate with them, preferring to herd sheep instead.
• When Zuo Botao dies, his best friend Yang Jiaoai takes the body back to the state of Qi for burial. Zuo Botao appears to Yang in a dream, saying that the spirit of the assassin Jing Re opposed the burial. Yang cuts his own throat so that he can join Zuo in the afterlife, and together they vanquish Jing Ke.
• During the Warring States period, Yu Boya, a Jin envoy, finds an understanding friend while playing the qin (zither) on Ma’an Mountain.
• During the Three Kingdoms period, Zhao Yun and Zhao Fan, governor of Guiyang, become blood brothers until Zhao Fan offers Zhao Yun his widowed sister-in-law as a bride. Zhao Yun angrily refuses out of respect for filial piety and overthrows Zhao Fan.

The historical narratives originate in a variety of historical classics and vernacular novels, such as Jingshi tongyan (Comprehensive Words to Admonish the World, seventeenth century), Shi ji (Historical Records, first century BC), Fengshen yanyi (Enfeoffment of the Gods, sixteenth century), Lienti zhuan (Traditions of Exemplary Women, first century BC), and Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, fourteenth century). In most cases, these narratives were made available to the general public through the medium of theatre and various forms of oral performance. Yet the preceding examples are not represented as theatrical, as none of the characters wear appropriate theatrical costume. What is more surprising about this selection is that there are relatively few references to the sword-fighter tales that one might assume to have commanded the greatest popularity. To the contrary, most deal in some way with the virtues of filial piety and fraternity, chivalry, and withdrawal from official duties. These frequent references to virtue support V.M. Alekseev’s conviction that although not a single example from his collection of 3,000 nianhua depicted Confucius, and in spite of frequently unorthodox interpretations, nianhua prints were nonetheless fundamentally Confucian. While they may have failed to appreciate the logic of Confucianism, nianhua printers nonetheless incorporated the moral aspects of the teaching into their work. Considering much of the material presented in the remainder of this chapter, this appears as a somewhat selective reading of the material, but in reference to the serialized historical narratives, there would seem to be some truth to the statement.

The point of much of the preceding discussion has been to demonstrate that nianhua artists defined their production in deference to the social and cultural themes and standards of their time, including standard histories and historicized Confucian values. This, however, neglects the presence of what might be called “unofficial history nianhua” and glosses over those many narratives that do not adhere to artistic, theatrical, and historical conventions. We may know from the literary histories (official or otherwise) that Shen Wansan, for example, was a wealthy subject of the Ming dynasty, but without the input of nianhua, how could we have known that “unofficially” Shen was given his fortune by the Dragon Ring?

Equally colourful renditions of history and historical figures can be found in many examples from the nianhua genre. One such design from the Yangjiabu Gongyi workshop that is supposed to have originated in the early Oing, but which was reprinted with sufficient frequency to deliver it to the present, portrays the highlights in the early life of the Ming dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang. Historically, Zhu was born a commoner, educated in a monastery, and became a bandit chief before embarking on his meteoric rise to power. The Yangjiabu print edition of the story endeavours to cover the whole string of incidents in a single sheet. Zhu Yuanzhang appears three times in different situations: involved with his various confederates, with the mystical forces that bestow the mandate of heaven, and with a bit of money for good measure. There is little in the arrangement of the print that contemporary viewers could consider temporal or spatial order, and the only means of division is to interrupt upper and lower strata by a convoluted line.

A similar structure exists in the print Bao Gong Takes Office, also of Gongyi workshop and attributed to Yang Fang (i8o6-go). Historically, “Judge” Bao Gong (Bao Cheng, 999-1062) was born in Anhui province as a commoner and rose to fame as chief investigative censor in the Song capital of Raifeng. Bao Gong began his ascent to cult figure status through a series of Yuan and Ming courtroom dramas that portray the Judge as a stern but just official. According to a more unorthodox legend, however, when the imperial court first sent for him to take his position, he refused to leave his unharvested crops. Fortunately the Heavenly Official (Tianguan), seeing that Bao was a worthy man, dispatched a team of immortals to take in the harvest, thus allowing Bao Gong to fill his post without sacrificing his precious grain.

Compared to the sombre and orderly format of the serialized historical tales, these interpretations of the past illustrate that there was still more than one way to tell a tale through the graphic text. The latter examples are unstructured insofar as they do not conform to standard historical accounts, and the graphics do not adhere to the relatively linear representational practices used at some Yangliuqing workshops. The presence of conflicting styles of representation within the same production centre, and even the same workshops, should caution the reader against assuming too much in terms of industry standardization. While the practices and conventions of representation from across the spectrum of Chinese representational and cultural practice had influenced the representational styles of village printers, this effect did not eliminate alternative styles or subjects of representation. The industry was, as I have said, prescriptive, but it was not perfectly prescriptive and so did not narrow the field to a single standard of representation.

About the Author

James A. Flath teaches in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario.

2007,Chapter 4: What Happens When Wang Yangming Crosses the Border? by Timothy Brook, p. 74-76.

The emperors of the Ming dynasty ruled a bounded territory. There might be occasional doubt as to where exactly the border ran in places where the terrain was rough and the state’s ability to control local populations weak. But everyone understood that borders existed, and all who served the Ming understood that imperial sovereignty extended only that far and not an inch beyond. A border marked a clear break between the order that Chinese sovereignty was thought to create and the disorder that its absence must imply. Being at the edge of sovereignty, where one thing became another, borderlands were places where sovereignty was difficult to enforce, where control required more stringent enforcement than was necessary elsewhere, and where administrative operations had to permit innovations and compromises that were unacceptable in the heartland. Borderlands were troubling to rule-enforcers; they were also politically dangerous for those faced with adjusting heartland rules to conditions in the periphery. This chapter is about one instance of alleged border-crossing in a Ming borderland and the great political excitement that this allegation caused.

Wang Shouren (1472-1529), better known by his sobriquet Yangming, was not only the most innovative philosopher of the Ming dynasty but one of its leading field administrators. His experience of dealing with civil disturbance and armed revolt, notably his suppression in 1519 of the rebellion of the Prince of Ning, Zhu Chenhao (d. 1521), in Jiangxi province endowed him with a reputation as a trouble-shooter. Although being politically savvy was the key to his success in the field, it was his military genius that he was most known for. Political rivalry at court turned his accomplishments against him, however, and he was sidelined by the Zhengde emperor (r. 1506-21) for the remainder of that man’s reign. The ascendancy of the Jiajing emperor (r. 1522-66) brought Wang out of retirement to serve as minister of war in Nanjing, but, in 1522, the obligation to mourn his father once again removed him from the corridors of power. He remained sidelined until June 1527, when the emperor ordered him to lead a campaign to quell a rebellion in the borderlands of Guangxi province, where violence among aboriginal tribes and between aboriginals and settled agriculturalists was endemic. Reinstated as minister of war, Wang was additionally invested with the rank of left censor-in-chief; was appointed superintendent of military affairs for Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Huguang; and was given wide discretionary powers to bring the uprising to an end.

Wang doubted his reputation as a military genius. He says as much in the memorial he sent back to the emperor, asking that he be excused from the commission to quell the southwest on the grounds that he was in poor health. Health aside, he insisted that the emperor should place his trust in the regional military leaders already on site as he himself was not the person best qualified for the job. “Your servant is only a student of books and is not skilled in military command,” he insisted. “My service in years past in Jiangxi led happily to a successful outcome entirely because I happened to meet with fortunate circumstances.” The emperor denied his request, and so Wang had no choice but to proceed to Guangxi. There he was successful again, through the same combination of good fortune and an ability to see his assignment in relation to larger problems. After the leading insurgents, Lu Su and Wang Shou, surrendered without a fight, Wang extended his campaign to quell Yao raiders in central Guangxi and bring the entire region under state control. The pacification of Guangxi would be Wang’s last great contribution to his dynasty. Too ill to wait for imperial authorization, Wang left his post and headed home, dying en route. Qing policy analysts would look back on this campaign as the last significant Ming intervention on the southern border.

Wang’s biography in the voluminous dynastic history gives only a brief account of the campaign and of the politics surrounding his service in the southwest.4 While he was on the campaign, Wang came under attack from Minister of Personnel Gui E (d. 1531). Wang’s biography provides a brief summary of Gui’s charges, one of which was that he tried to capitalize on his success in Guangxi by using the surrendered rebel forces under this command to invade Jiaozhi (a classical term used for Vietnam, and sometimes Laos). It was a serious charge, and Wang’s supporters at court were alarmed. Both Hanlin Academician Fang Xianfu (d. 1544) and Minister of Rites Huo Tao (1487-1540) submitted memorials in his defence. Fang’s original memorial seems no longer to exist, but Huo’s does. Huo rose to the charge by arguing: “An official may be permitted to cross the border [chu jiang, which might also be translated as ‘proceed beyond a borderland’] when it is purely to do something that can bring peace to the guojia (nation) and benefit to the sheji [altars of soil and grain].” Wang Yangming thus stood accused by one party of crossing a border without authorization and stood defended by another of doing so for a legitimate reason.

This chapter is an exegesis of Huo Tao’s statement, which I have undertaken in order to answer these three questions: Why was border-crossing selected as the charge designed to ruin Wang Yangming’s reputation? What was at stake in the charge? And what does this tell us about the understanding of borders and borderlands in Ming political theory and practice? To approach these questions, we need first to survey the contexts central to this story: (1) the politics at the Jiajing court, (2) the reputation and political status of Wang Yangming, and (3) the security situation in Guangxi province. That done, we can turn to the charge and the defence and, more particularly, the language of the defence, in order to assess why border-crossing was regarded as a politically vulnerable act as well as why it could be defended. None of this will reveal much about what went on in the borderland; but some of it should indicate what borders could be made to do through the process of being talked about as well as how the borderland could provide fodder for political struggles that had nothing whatsoever to do with borders.

About the Author

Diana Lary is a professor emerita of history at the University of British Columbia.

Contributors include Timothy Brook, Nicola Di Cosmo, Benjamin Elman, Stevan Harrell, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Pitman Potter, Peter Perdue, André Schmid, Leo Shin, Wang Ning, Alexander Woodside, and Victor Zatsepine.

The 1989 Tiananmen incident was a crucial test of the vitality of the new ideas about the state and society developed in the late 1980s. Immediately after 4 June, almost all of these ideas were attacked in both the official media and academic journals. People who had advocated them were completely silenced. Many of those who had pioneered them belonged to either what Goldman termed the “democratic elite” – Hu Yaobang’s intellectual network and their associates – or Zhao Ziyang’s “think tanks.” Both groups were purged after the incident. Their members were jailed, fled overseas, or simply ceased publication in academic journals. In her book, Goldman described the fates of some of these scholars, which partially explained why most of these people became silent.

However, the new ideas about the state and society not only reappeared soon after they were criticized, but gained greater acceptance among the intellectuals. Even the most sensitive issue, political pluralism, was raised again. The revival of these ideas also coincided with the appearance of a large number of new names in Chinese academic journals, indicating the emergence of a new, post-Tiananmen generation of Chinese scholars.

The Tiananmen crackdown was followed by a criticism campaign, which targeted key concepts such as state-society dualism, marketization, giving power back to society, economic freedom, individual freedom, social pluralism, political pluralism, and checks and balances. In the second half of 1989 and throughout 1990, the criticism campaign more or less dominated the official and academic publications. However, a year after the Tiananmen incident, dissenting voices began to reappear in academic journals. For example, in mid-1990, Zhongguo Faxue (Chinese legal science) carried several articles discussing democracy and the rule of law. One author claimed that during the “preliminary stage of socialism” – a term coined by the regime to justify a private sector economy in China – it was still necessary to fight for freedom, democracy, and civil rights, ostensibly for their realization in the higher stage of socialism. Another author emphasized the similarities between “socialist democracy” and “bourgeois democracy” and declared that “democracy is a spiritual wealth that belongs to the whole of mankind,” which therefore should not be monopolized by capitalist countries. An article in Ningxia Shehui Kexue (Social sciences in Ningxia) suggested that the lack of institutionalized participation was responsible for the 1989 social unrest. The author cited Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of the relationship between institutionalization and participation to justify the necessity of establishing democratic procedures so as to avoid “participation crisis” and political alienation caused by “participation failure.” Such use of Western political science terminology recalled the pre-Tiananmen debate on political modernization.

In 1991, the criticism campaign clearly began to flag. Unorthodox ideas reappeared in terms that were more or less acceptable to the regime leadership. More and more articles appeared in academic journals and leading newspapers to challenge the orthodox views expressed during the criticism campaign. For example, in clear reply to the revival of “proletarian dictatorship” amid the “anti-bourgeois liberalization” campaign, an article in Fujian Xuekan (Fujian journal of learning) repeated the old argument that the function of the state was not merely “class suppression,” but primarily the management of public affairs for the whole society. Taking advantage of the regime’s increased tolerance of academic discussions on the issue of human rights, an article in Shehui Kexue (Social sciences) pointed out that democracy meant the recognition of individual rights: there was no sovereignty of the people to speak of if people did not enjoy their human rights. A Guangming Ribao (Guangming daily) article expressed the view that democracy was a process of articulation, exchange, and coordination of social interests, and that the so-called people’s fundamental interest was simply the “optimal point of combination” of different social interests. An article in Zhengzhi yu Falu (Politics and law) carefully distinguished between the “restriction of power” and “checks and balances” in order to justify the former. Liberal-minded scholars who had lain low for almost two years were again feeling out the boundaries of the regime’s tolerance.

While 1991 saw cautious testing of the political waters, 1992 saw dramatic change in the political climate, caused primarily by Deng Xiaoping’s Nanxun (southern tour) speeches. Deng probably intended no more than to revive the sluggish economy and to gain back some ground that had been lost to the more conservative elders. Nevertheless, his speeches triggered a wave of articles in the official media throughout China criticizing the “left,” meaning orthodox Leninism, and demanding the “liberation of the mind,” a watchword for the liberals since the beginning of the reform. In June, the official party newspaper Renmin Ribao (People’s daily) carried an article by Rong Yiren, who was then president of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and later became vice-president of the PRC. Rong reasserted the famous Dengist slogan that “practice” was “the sole criterion of truth,” implying that the conservative backlash had failed to address the country’s economic problems. In July, the “anti-left” and “liberation of the mind” themes were further played up in a Renmin Ribao editorial. One immediate effect of this sudden and surprising change of climate was the revival of all the key ideas about the state and society that had developed in the intellectual circles in the 1980s – their hibernation ended quite abruptly.

Most discussions of the state-society relationship in the 1990s focused on a few familiar topics, namely, the role of the government, societal freedom and independence, social pluralism, and political pluralism. However, the issue of civil society now attracted much greater attention than before and some new ideas were proposed, apparently stimulated by the Western interest in civil society in China in the early 1990s.

About the Author

Yijiang Ding is a Professor of Political Science and Chair of the International Relations Program at Okanagan University-College.

Chinese Democracy After Tiananmen
Yijiang Ding

184 Pages

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1) Encourage the study of subjects related to China, especially in American educational institutions;
2) Advance such study and teaching through the exchange of information and scholarship across disciplinary lines;
3) Promote understanding and communication between Western and Eastern scholars involved in Chinese studies.

Erika Evasdottir, 2004, Chapter 5, p.163-66.

‘The most important thing to remember,’ said Cai one day while we were discussing my soon-to-be-reoriented perception of the rigid nature of archeological lives, is that ‘a person is never simply an archeologist. One is only an archeologist at certain times and for certain reasons.’ Cai then proceeded to tell me how his calculated combination of his different roles and duties in relation to the event of his son’s birth catapulted him to the exalted position of vice director of his provincial institute at the age of thirty-two.

When Cai arrived at his danwei, just after graduation from university, he was already engaged to be married. He lived with his wife a few days after their marriage but otherwise spent his first two years in the field excavating (save for returning briefly at New Year’s). This lengthy stint in the field is believed appropriate for young archeologists because they need training and experience. And, in any case, there was no place ready for the couple to live together, so he lived at the field site, while she continued to live with her parents. Eventually, her danwei, the railway danwei (much better financed than the archeologists), managed to get her a flat, and Cai returned and moved in for a few months, during which time she became pregnant.

Near the end of her pregnancy, however, Cai was once again sent out into the field. He was not able to be present for the birth of the child and was given only one opportunity to phone his wife after the event (to find out the sex of the child). The child was a boy and the birth particularly difficult. Yet at no time did Cai complain to his director about not being allowed to go to see his wife and son. Rather, he relayed the news to his director with apparent cheer and a happy martyrdom. Cai made sure that his director understood that he was clearly putting the needs of work above the needs of his family. More importantly, he made sure that everyone in the danwei, including the party secretary and officials, knew that he was being a ‘bad’ father in order to be a ‘good’ junior.

Cai was counting on the idea that his commitment to work, appropriate given his age and the ideal of being a good (hardworking) archeologist, would maintain his reputation in the eyes of the audience and convince it that he was being forced to act as a bad father, not that he was a bad father. Once he had the sympathy of audience members, he could be sure that they would start to question how his superior could allow such a thing to occur. The ideal superior, after all, has the responsibility to take care of the needs of his inferiors. One of those needs is clearly related to enabling his inferior’s duties as father and husband. By interfering with those time-honoured roles, the superior opens himself up to the criticism that he is not a good superior. The audience notices and comments; gossip leads to a loss of reputation; a loss of reputation, in turn, leads to a loss of ability to be considered either trustworthy (if he cannot even live up to his responsibilities as a superior, then how can he be trusted to enter responsibly into a social relationship of any kind?) or compatible (he has a bad reputation, so why would someone chance becoming involved with him when he probably has no access to important people?).

Cai played the dutiful inferior as submissively and as close as possible to the ideal characteristics of a good inferior. In so doing, he fought to control the interpretations of his actions by the audience. His success was not certain: his director, for example, could have fought to convince the danwei audience that his duty as director, to place the needs of the many over the needs of the few, justified his actions. It was impossible for the director to react in this way, however, not just because of Cai’s clever performance of submission but also because of luck. Cai was simply lucky that the difficult birth and a male child called up sympathy from the audience. Such was the sympathy for his predicament that the director was rendered helpless. Only if the danwei had been in some immediate crisis could the director have convinced anyone that Cai’s failure to attend his child’s birth was required to protect the danwei.

Had Cai complained, resisted, or criticized his director in person in front of other people, the director could indeed have used all the authority of his senior position in the hierarchy to back up his treatment of Cai. Criticizing a director in public transgresses an important aspect of a person’s role both as inferior and as danwei colleague: that person ruins the reputation of his leader. Morally speaking, juniors are not supposed to do that, but, more importantly, ruining the reputation of the leader of the danwei is a little like shooting oneself, and certainly one’s colleagues, in the foot. The officials would be utterly pleased to have the reputation of the director ruined, for it makes their task of refusing to give him important resources (e.g., the bud-get) that much easier. Danwei audience members, whether or not they like or respect their director, certainly want him to have all the tools needed to negotiate for the resources they need. Had Cai criticized his superior’s actions, the danwei director could probably have had the audience sympathizing with him and criticizing Cai for being a bad comrade, a bad father, a bad archeologist, and an insubordinate besides.

Cai, however, played his cards correctly. He did not get to see his son until seven months after his birth. That kind of sacrifice requires some fairly substantial recompense. The director responded by giving Cai multiple opportunities, including the chance to take a special course to secure the right to excavate. That right is considered a plum benefit since only when one can direct one’s own excavation can one also publish. Moreover, only then does one have the authority to invite others to join the excavation and to control access to the data, both of which represent important resources in the struggle to build a career. Later Cai was even offered the opportunity to return to university to finish his MA degree. By providing him with such rare opportunities, the director felt satisfied that he had done his best to compensate Cai and would be seen by the audience to have acted appropriately toward his junior. Not only would he therefore be above criticism, but also any success Cai attained would be considered as much the director’s doing as Cai’s. Cai, in return, was happy to tell anyone who would listen about the excellence of his director. By associative logic, the two can continue to benefit from each other’s reputation of being trustworthy (such dutiful seniors and juniors) and compatible (both clearly able to access considerable resources).

By the time that Cai was thirty, he was perfectly positioned – in a system that rewards the accumulation of academic degrees and pays close attention to excavation experience – to be chosen by the officials to become the vice director of the danwei. Over the same time period, the ‘virtuous’ director himself had been promoted from his post as director of the institute to the height of officialdom as the vice director of the Ministry of Culture. Given the new position that each has, and the new resources that each represents, Cai and his (formerly archeological but now bureaucratic) superior maintain their relationship and explore the new kinds of mutual benefit that each can expect from the other.

Not every junior can make the sacrifices needed to get audience sympathy and, therefore, control audience interpretation of his actions. It takes a certain kind of will, or incentive, for a person to undertake the kinds of actions and endure the short-term criticism that might, if everything goes well, lead to long-term success. Cai, by his own admission, is a callous, thick-skinned man. He needed a thick skin to endure the criticisms heaped on him by his mother (and his parents-in-law) for not having defied his director just a little and returned to help his wife. He had to be strong over the intervening years that it took him to complete both the special classes and the master’s degree in the face of continuing criticism by his family. Had it not worked out so well – now he is the darling of the household, of course – he would be criticized for the rest of his life as a bad husband. After all, a husband’s duty is to protect and help his wife in the same way that the superior’s duty is to protect and help his inferior. If things had not gone well, Cai could have lost all his trustworthiness and compatibility within his family. Worse, once he has a bad reputation, by associative logic, his families’ (both his and his wife’s) reputations would also have suffered. Cai took a big chance.
Others in a similar situation might choose a way to remain submissive enough to the director yet still put family first. Perhaps the result would not be so beneficial for one’s future career, but it would make home life more comfortable. Had Cai decided to emphasize his role as husband rather than inferior, he could have gone about it in ways that would not have completely destroyed his relationship with his director. When I asked how he could have done things differently, Cai said, with a big grin, that one of the best ways would have been to have his mother travel the great distance to the site and personally beg the director to let Cai return. It would be difficult for a director to go against the wishes of a mother importuning him on her daughter-in-law’s behalf.

Note that, in this hypothetical situation, Cai never described his mother as requesting anything for herself (she does not say that she wants to see Cai) or for him (she leaves him out of it and takes all responsibility for the situation on herself; he could even beg her to go home in front of the director); rather, her request is on behalf of her daughter-in-law alone. More-over, she never blames the director for taking Cai into the field at the wrong time. The best thing is for her to blame everything on herself. She could express her sorrow at how she did not plan the marriage or pregnancy properly and how terrible she feels about having to ask for the director’s help in this way. Her role as an inferior woman and mother gives the director both a moral impetus to act (males should guide and aid females) and a way to avoid being blamed for getting Cai into such a situation in the first place. It is, after all, a perfectly acceptable trope in Chinese society to blame every-thing on a woman.

Cai noted that these strategies would certainly have succeeded in allowing him to see his son yet insisted that they would have been bad for both him and his son in the long term. By doing his mother a favour, the director would escape being beholden to Cai. Instead, Cai would be in debt to the director for the favour of cleaning up a messy situation brought down on Cai by the women in his family. As a result, Cai would not receive all the opportunities that have helped him in his career in such a stellar fashion – opportunities, he added, that will lead his son to better educational and job-related opportunities.

The art of combination is often used by female archeologists to avoid going into the field. There are few female archeologists for a number of reasons, many of which are explored in Chapter 7. Suffice it to say here that young, unmarried, female archeologists are, in fact, expected to excavate as often as any young man. Some women, of course, are perfectly happy to go into the field, enjoy excavation, and look forward to it. Others, however, are horrified at the very thought of leaving the city for the country.

Author’s Commentary

As per the main title of the book, “Obedient Autonomy,” the central thesis of this book is that autonomy (the ability to divert resources or intervene in events for one’s own purposes) arises out of obedience. Obedience, however, is not to a person, but rather to rules. Take hockey, for example. Hockey has written rules that establish a framework that we obey when we play, or else we face penalties. Yet despite the rules being clear and unchanging, no-one would say that it is obvious who will win a given game. Unless you think a game is rigged, but then your complaint is about cheating or some such and is not a questioning of the legitimacy of the written rules. Obedience simply means that you do not attack or rebel against the rules.

Now, imagine that you live not just with one set of rules, but with almost infinite sets of rules. Because as a hockey player you are not just a hockey player, but rather also a captain, right forward or a goalie; an old-timer and a legend or a nervous rookie; a well-loved team member or an arrogant star; a man or a woman. In the Olympics, you’ve got to affirm your national identity while otherwise you are a member of a team that includes many nations. And of course you are also someone’s family member, friend or enemy. In short, this book defines “rules” not just as written rules and regulations, but as stereotypes and roles. A stereotype (jock, team captain, rookie) or role dyad (coach-player, captain-team member, old-timer-rookie) sets forth rules for behavior and interaction as rigid – or as slippery – as do written rules and regulations.
These ideas are examined through ethnographic examples drawn from the experiences of archaeologists in the PRC. Thus, for example, imagine you are a father from northern China who is a mid-level archaeologist studying the Three Dynasties time period. Each of those stereotypes – father, Chinese person, northern Chinese person, archaeologist, mid-level archaeologist, and Three Dynasties archaeologist – provides a set of (often contradictory) expectations and obligations. And each of father, mid-level archaeologist and Three Dynasties archaeologist has a position in a more or less rigid hierarchy in the family, the danwei, and the archaeological profession, respectively, and as a result the rules of interaction with one’s superiors and inferiors in these such different contexts may also conflict. In short, the number of things you, as this individual, “ought” to do, the number of expectations and obligations you “should” fulfill, are frankly too numerous to count.

As stated in the second half of the book’s title, “the Achievement of Orderly Life,” you, as this over-regulated individual, must figure out a way to seek order from this chaos of possibilities. “Order” is achieved by convincing everyone (everyone who matters, anyway) to agree on which set of rules ought to apply in any given context. The context itself, of course, can help, since it is easier to convince people that you should be judged as an archaeologist if you are sitting in a big hole in the ground holding a trowel. Once you have convinced people that you should be judged as an archaeologist and not something else (enemy, intellectual, father) under a given set of circumstances, then you have succeeded in establishing order, in the form of a framework for interpretation of action. Order refers not just to the rules of behavior for an archaeologist, but also his or her social position and all the other details that will help you figure out how to act to convince other people (other archaeologists, peasant-farmers, local officials) that you are a good and proper archaeologist. In short, you’ve basically established, and others have agreed, that the game to be played is, say, hockey. And, like a hockey player, you do not question the rules of the game, but are rather much more interested in the winning of the game and the strategies and tactics required to win (or at least to score a goal or two, or at least to be well-liked by your teammates…).

Of course, the book goes into details to explain how the peculiar circumstances of archaeologists in the PRC shapes the success rate of a given archaeologist in his or her attempts to convince others to use one set of rules rather than another under certain circumstances. Details concerning memory and reputation, and how past successes – or failures – can become resources for the future, are explained and those stereotypes that are less flexible than others are discussed. But from these detailed examples, the main point remains simple: our autonomy arises not from shaking ourselves free of society and its demands, but rather as a consequence of exploiting the contradictions that inevitably must arise as a result of the obligations and expectations associated with ever more numerous sets of social rules.

About the Author

After training with Dr. Fumiko Ikawa-Smith at McGill University, Erika Evasdottir went to study with Drs. K.C. Chang, Michael Herzfeld, Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky and James L. Watson at Harvard University to produce her social anthropological analysis of archaeologists in the PRC. Her interests lie in the generative potential of rules. Rather than conceiving of rules as rigid networks constraining individuals, she elaborates on the supposition that rules can be seen as resources for individuals to manipulate or otherwise create opportunities for themselves. Her interest in the slipperiness of rules and regulatory systems led her eventually to study law at Columbia University School of Law and she now is a corporate lawyer helping PRC clients negotiate the rules of international business out of Hong Kong. She also teaches as an Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in both the anthropology and gender studies departments and keeps an eye on the current financial crisis as it continues to offer up samples of the unfailing ability of individuals to turn to their own purposes – whether good or bad – even the most rigid of regulatory systems.

Obedient Autonomy
Chinese Intellectuals and the Achievement of Orderly Life
Erika Evasdottir

320 Pages

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Hsiao-Ting Lin, 2006, Prologue, p. 3-6, 9-11.

Shen Zonglian, our former Representative to Tibet, has been teaching in Lynchburg College (VA) since the government retreated to Taiwan. He is both capable and reliable, with a good command of both Chinese and English, and he is able to use the Tibetan language. While I was serving as Foreign Minister I used to entrust him with matters of contacting the Dalai Lama’s followers … My opinion is that now we should secretly dispatch Shen to India, and make contact with [the Dalai Lama’s brother] Gyalo Thundrup who is now in Kalimpong. After Shen has explored the whole situation more clearly in India, he may come to Taiwan to give you a firsthand report … It is better that Shen should not come to Taiwan [before he goes to India], and for the time being his secret contact with us should be kept completely confidential … In your future instructions I beg your Excellency to use “Mary” as nickname for Shen, “Li Da” for the Dalai Lama, and “Hua Sheng” for Gyalo Thundrup.

This recently declassified telegram was originally dispatched from Washington DC to Taipei by George K.C. Yeh, then the Republic of China’s ambassador to the United States, ten days after the 14th Dalai Lama was exiled to India in March 1959. Four days later, Chiang Kai-shek approved Yeh’s proposal, in a desperate attempt to gather the latest information about the astonishing revolt in Tibet, and to sound out the possibility of forming a coalition between the Dalai Lama’s forces and his exiled government in Taipei. This exchange of confidential dispatches provides insight into the extent of the clandestine activities that were under consideration and were possibly being carried out by Chiang Kai-shek and his advisors when the Tibetan issue unexpectedly came under the international spotlight. It further reminds us that, just two decades earlier on the mainland of China, it was Chiang Kai-shek’s regime that had been the main player in the protracted and uneasy game of Sino- Tibetan relations. For more than two decades, Chiang’s Nationalist government had had to grapple with the same issues that later confronted Mao Zedong’s Communist regime – issues that came to a head with the bloody pacification of the 1959 Tibetan revolt.

With hindsight, the series of reforms launched by Zhao Erfeng in the .nal days of the Qing can be regarded as modern China’s first state-building attempt in its southwest border regions. This effort was suspended as a result of the collapse of the Qing court. What was perhaps more signi.cant was that, with the ousting of Zhao Erfeng’s troops, along with Chinese authority, from Tibet proper, the status of Tibet as part of China’s frontier became a highly controversial issue that would remain, to all intents and purposes, unresolved throughout the subsequent Republican and Nationalist eras. After 1912, the Han Chinese continued to assert that their authority extended over the whole of Tibet, but the Lhasa authorities began to administer their own government and to formulate policy without reference to Chinese officials. As China became a republic, Sino-Tibetan relations entered a new, but still problematic, stage.

The new Chinese Republic was officially established on 1 January 1912, two months before the last Qing emperor .nally abdicated. Immediately after its foundation, the Peking republican regime began to show interest, at least according to its official announcements, in transforming the Inner Asian dependencies of the defunct Qing into integral parts of the Chinese state. In response to the unstable frontier situation, President Yuan Shikai’s of.cials propagated a doctrine of equality among the “five nationalities” of China – the Han, Manchu, Mongols, Tibetans, and Hui – the major component peoples of the former Qing empire. This five-nationality doctrine was premised upon the Han belief that border peoples only wanted equal treatment under a Chinese administration, not freedom from Chinese control altogether. Yet behind the political philosophy of such a five-nationality republic may have been a wish on the part of the new Chinese authorities to restore a collapsed frontier and ethnopolitical order, this time with Han Chinese at the centre. As far as Tibet was concerned, Peking hastily restored the rank and title of the exiled Dalai Lama, blaming the former Manchu regime and its ambans for the wrongdoings that had led to his flight. However, the Dalai Lama, who in 1912 returned to Lhasa with British Indian patronage, was no longer prepared to trust any Chinese promises or to accept Chinese authority over his territory. In a proclamation to Tibetans, he described the existing relationship between Tibet and China as that of patron and priest and declared that it was “not based on the subordination of one to the other.” Today, this statement is still regarded by many Tibetans as a Tibetan declaration of independence from China.

Not surprisingly, the way in which Han Chinese officials viewed the border regions did not reflect the views of non-Han Chinese inhabitants on the peripheries. In Outer Mongolia, Mongol nobles and princes declared independence in November 1911, with a reputed living Buddha (Bogd Khan) as head of the state. Between 1915 and 1921, due to a series of successful political and military manoeuvres by the Chinese government, Outer Mongolia was temporarily returned to China’s political grasp. However, at no time were Yuan Shikai and his successors in Peking able to restore even partial Chinese authority in Tibet in the same way. As is well known, in 1913-14 when the British proposed that a tripartite conference on Tibet’s status be held in India at Simla, the Chinese government was, indeed, forced to accept the participation of Tibetan delegates at the international conference on an equal footing. But no consensus concerning Tibet’s status was reached at the conference. The Tibetans claimed independence from Chinese authority, whereas the Chinese uncompromisingly insisted on maintaining China’s sovereignty over Tibet. Not only did the dispute concerning Tibet’s status remain unresolved, but no effective agreement was reached regarding more pragmatic matters, such as the demarcation of a Sino-Tibetan border. Finally the British intervened and proposed a plan for an Inner and Outer Tibet under different degrees of Chinese and Tibetan control. The Tibetans tentatively agreed, but at the last minute the Chinese government repudiated this agreement, despite the Chinese delegate at Simla already having initialed the draft version of the convention.
The failure to reach an agreed and definite Sino-Tibetan boundary at Simla to a large extent contributed to the border war in 1917-18 between the Tibetan army and the Chinese garrison stationed at Chamdo. Claiming that the whole Kham area was part of their territory, the Tibetans not only drove the Chinese armies back east of the upper Yangtze River (Gold Sand River), but also further sought to take all of the western part of Kham. At this point, the British again stepped in and negotiated a truce, with the result that the upper Yangtze River became the de facto Sino-Tibetan boundary, until the early 1950s when the People’s Liberation Army crossed the river and “liberated” Tibet. After the armed border conflict, in 1920, a Gansu provincial mission was dispatched to Lhasa by the Chinese central authorities, presumably with a view to improving the frosty relations with Tibet, but the Chinese officials achieved little more than the privilege of stepping onto Tibetan soil for the first time since 1912. In contrast to the deteriorating Sino-Tibetan relationship, Anglo- Tibetan relations in the early 1920s reached a new height. From 1920 on, the Dalai Lama carried out a series of reforms in order to modernize his country, and the ruling class of Tibet relied heavily on the British both financially and technically. During this period, against a backcloth of British patronage, a relatively weak Chinese central regime, and a chaotic situation in China proper, the Tibetans were able to enjoy an independent status free from Chinese dominance, even if such independence was de facto, not de jure.

About the Author

Hsiao-ting Lin is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier
Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928-49
Hsiao-ting Lin

304 Pages

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The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

As of March 2009, the website contains more than 1,400 articles.  4,000 subscribers receive a weekly newsletter linking to four to eight new articles. More than 300,000 articles are accessed each month by more than 110,000 reader visits.  The journal prides itself on being freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

Major themes addressed by Journal authors include war and historical memory in the long twentieth century, the geopolitics and political economy of the Asia-Pacific, with particular attention the Japan, China and Korea, the atomic bomb, war crimes, textbook nationalism, regional development and reconciliation.

The coordinators of The Asia-Pacific Journal are Andrew DeWit  Rikkyo University, Tokyo; Geoffrey Gunn Nagasaki University, Nagasaki; Laura Hein Northwestern University, Chicago; Gavan McCormack Australian National University, Canberra; R.Taggart Murphy Tsukuba University Tokyo; David McNeill Sophia University, Tokyo; Mark Selden Cornell University, Ithaca; Yuki Tanaka Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima; William Underwood Independent Scholar, Sacramento. The Asia-Pacific Journal can be reached at info.japanfocus@gmail.com

Mark Selden
Coordinator, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

http://japanfocus.org/

In 1912 and 1913, the new Ministry of Education began to design a school system that would manifest the Republican spirit. Its first edict was terminological: the modern schools established in the late Qing period would now be called “schools” (xuexiao) rather than “study halls” (xuetang). The ministry tried to erase all traces of imperial education by banning official Qing textbooks, the terms that referred to the imperial system and the Qing court, the study of Confucian classics in primary school, and the practice of awarding imperial titles to graduates. The unified educational system was meant to create enlightened citizens (guomin) for the new republic.

In 1913, when the political situation had stabilized, the Ministry of Education launched an ambitious educational inspection program that covered twenty-two of a total of twenty-three provinces. The inspectors chalked up the poor results of Qing efforts at educational modernization to fragmentation and inconsistency. Government leaders believed that, if they could unify the nation’s education system, they would unify the country. The minister of education declared:

I believe that running a state has two components: dealing with internal and external affairs. Without excellent education, we cannot compete with other countries; without unified education, we cannot eliminate domestic disturbances. Recently our country has experienced a series of incidents, and internal affairs have become more pressing than external affairs. In establishing the goals of education, we should make unifying education our first priority. When education is unified the citizens’ thinking will be unified; when the citizens’ thinking is unified domestic disturbances will not take place … [I]f education is not unified there will be no unified thought; if citizens’ thinking is not unified it will be impossible to build a unified country.

Measures to unify and centralize teachers’ schools included nationalizing higher teachers’ colleges and placing secondary teachers’ schools under the control of provincial governments. In addition, teachers’ schools took charge of developing and supervising local education.

When the Qing court established teachers’ schools in the first decade of the twentieth century, provinces, especially economically and educationally advanced ones, were encouraged to set up their own advanced teachers’ colleges. By 1911, there were fourteen college-level teachers’ schools, including combined colleges. This system reflected the political conditions of the late Qing: more responsibilities devolved to the provinces as the central government gradually collapsed.

The Republican system put power over higher education in the hands of the central government, and teachers’ schools – at both tertiary and secondary levels – drove the enterprise. Setting up a unified teachers’ school system would, it was hoped, unify the Chinese educational system. The first step was to nationalize teachers’ colleges. In 1913, the minister of education stated:

Teachers who will serve in secondary teachers’ schools are to be trained in higher teachers’ colleges [gaodeng shifan xuexiao], so [these colleges] are the foundation of the foundation [genben zhi genben] … Only if we nationalize higher teachers’ colleges and administer them through the central government … making the state’s spirit their spirit and the state’s principle their principle, will we be able to achieve unity … So, to unify education we should set up national higher teachers’ colleges immediately: this is indeed the best plan for setting the country on a firm footing [shi wei guojia genben zhiji].

The central government was intent on regaining control over the provinces. At the end of the Qing, there were only three public universities: Capital University in Beijing, Beiyang University in Tianjin, and Shanxi University in Taiyuan. At the same time, each province also had various higher colleges (gaodeng xuexiao) and preparatory schools (yuke), which functioned as bridges between middle schools and universities (or specialized colleges). The higher colleges were abolished in 1912, and the three public universities were added around 1920.

In 1913, the Ministry of Education planned to reduce the previous fourteen teachers’ colleges to six national ones – located in Beijing, Wuchang, Nanjing, Shenyang, Guangzhou, and Chengdu – that would supplant the provincial higher teachers’ colleges. In 1914, only two higher teachers’ colleges, those in Beijing and Wuchang, were in the hands of the central government. Between 1915 and 1917, the other four were established in Nanjing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Shenyang. (Shenyang Higher Teachers’ College was originally a local secondary teachers’ school with several college programs. Thanks to the efforts of the Ministry of Education, initiated in 1916, it became a higher teachers’ college in 1918.) During that period, a number of provincial teachers’ colleges were either demoted to provincial secondary teachers’ schools or closed. The Ministry of Education long planned to establish a higher teachers’ college in Xi’an to provide teaching personnel for northwestern China, an educationally backward region. But financial difficulties and political instability kept Shaanxi Teachers’ College from opening until the 1930s. Although all of the efforts to achieve political unity were frustrated during the 1910s, progress on the educational front can be measured by the discussions held in 1918 by the presidents of the national teachers’ colleges. Their united mission to see normal colleges spread across the map of China and their willingness to distribute student quotas across the country symbolized China’s desire to be a unified nation.

Even as the Ministry of Education nationalized teachers’ colleges, it ordered that the administration of secondary teachers’ schools set up in the last decade of the Qing be transferred to provincial governments. The new order for teachers’ schools also stipulated that, once they had been granted permission from the heads of the provincial and national departments of education, county governments could establish secondary teachers’ schools. The order also permitted private teachers’ schools, and it was during this period that missionary schools for teachers were set up. Private teachers’ schools were few, however, compared to government schools (which were free of charge).

About the Author

Xiaoping Cong is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston.

Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897-1937
Xiaoping Cong

320 Pages

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